Saturday, September 13, 2008

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards

The NJCCCS for Computer and Information Literacy and Technology Education, enumerate by number and letter, a series of strands and cumulative progress indicators for teachers to follow and specify what skills are to be acquired by students at the end of grades, 4, 8 and 12 respectively.
There are many arguments, pro and con that are affiliated with the standards. The strengths of the NJCCCS include but are not limited to the following: (1) they provide teachers with direction regarding both course content and skills to be mastered at the completion of certain grade levels; (2) they help to make instruction among various teacher classrooms across the state more uniform in terms of both skills and content; (3) the uniformity of instruction makes state required standardized testing more feasible; (4) they promote opportunities for higher learning thinking as per Bloom's taxonomy such as independent learning, critical thinking, problems solving and decision making skills.
The weakness associated with the NJCCCS include but are not limited to the following: (1) the mandatory documentation of the combined number and letter codes for each of the standards taught by the teacher in a given lesson by many administrations in the teachers lesson plans significantly slows down the process of writing them; (2) the strands are not written in the form of performance objectives (i.e., 85% of the students will be able to formulate a simple code that will enable them to add a given column of numbers in an excel spreadsheet); (3) the standards sometimes results in instructors teaching to the floor and not the ceiling , that is, teaching to a test often means that other important aspects of a discipline are ignored since they are not tested.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Trish,

Great synopsis of the NJCCCS! You should submit that to Wikipedia! I have a question for you: do you think the pros outweigh the cons? I agree that the NJCCCS are probably, at times, an insufficient use of a teacher's time and tend to make some teachers teach to "the floor and not the ceiling," but I think overall the uniformity it brings to the curricula in all the schools throughout the state make it all worth while. That said, I'm not actually teaching yet, so I haven't had to deal with the headache of constantly citing the standards in lesson plans. Considering you are both a high school teacher and a professor, I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Katie