What are the advantages of standards-based education?
Standards can help colleges and universities to make the transition in emphasis from what the courses teach to what students actually learn. Academic standards also can enable students to know what they are expected to understand, professors to know what to teach, and employers to be cognizant of what graduates are learning in college. When advancement through higher education is determined by performance on such standards and assessments, the value of a degree becomes a publicly known achievement, understood by policymakers, students and their tuition-paying families, and employers.
To be effective, standards should be high, achievable, and credible to these broad constituencies. Moreover, with standards in place through all sectors of public education, pre-school through post-secondary, states can achieve a better alignment of the currently dissociated systems. Such alignment should decrease the need for remediation. At present, many students experience difficulty in crossing boundaries such as those from middle school to high school, from high school to college, or from one transfer point to another in college.
There are benefits of standards-based learning especially for students who transfer - and students are increasingly mobile. Standards should foster program coherence and articulation between institutions and hence enable more efficient transfer, with fewer credits lost by students. Standards-based education should make coherent learning possible within a complex system. Aware of these many advantages, the QUE project will provide robust direct measures of learning evaluations of authentic performances and student portfolios that are linked to the QUE-established standards of quality.