PREFACE
Applied Learning focuses on the capabilities people need to be productive members of society, as individuals who apply the knowledge gained in school and elsewhere to analyze problems and propose solutions, to communicate effectively and coordinate action with others, and to use the tools of the information age workplace. It connects the work students do in school with the demands of the twenty-first century workplace.

This volume contains the first New York City edition of the New Standards™ Performance Standards for Applied Learning. The standards set out in this volume establish the same high expectations for student performance as those published by New Standards—the standards are unchanged from those published by New Standards. What distinguishes this edition is the collection of student work samples included to illustrate the meaning of standard-setting work. The collection has been revised extensively to reflect work produced by students studying in New York City’s public schools.

This volume of the New York City edition of the standards focuses exclusively upon Applied Learning. The first New York City editions of the New Standards™ Performance Standards for Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science were published in 1997, 1998, and 1999 respectively.

ABOUT NEW STANDARDS
New Standards was established in 1991 as a collaboration of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh and the National Center on Education and the Economy, in partnership with states and urban school districts. The Board of Education of the City of New York was a member of the New Standards partnership from its inception. The New Standards partners set out to build an assessment system to measure student progress toward meeting national standards at levels that are internationally benchmarked. The performance standards are one of the major products of the New Standards partnership. Support for the development of the performance standards was provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the New Standards partners.

The New Standards Governing Board included chief state school officers, governors and their representatives, and others representing the diversity of the partnership, whose jurisdictions enroll nearly half of the Nation’s students. These performance standards were endorsed unanimously by the New Standards Governing Board in June 1996.

The New Standards partnership formally ended in June 1997. Continuing research and development, and technical assistance to support implementation of the products of New Standards, are managed by the National Center on Education and the Economy on behalf of the National Center and the University of Pittsburgh.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE STANDARDS
New Standards adopted the distinction between content standards and performance standards that is articulated in Promises to Keep: Creating High Standards for American Students (1993), a report commissioned by the National Education Goals Panel. Content standards specify “what students should know and be able to do”; performance standards go the next step to specify “how good is good enough.”

These standards are designed to make content standards operational by answering the question: how good is good enough?

As a newer focus of study, Applied Learning does not have a distinct professional constituency producing content standards on which performance standards can be built. However, the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) laid a foundation for the field in its report, Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance (1992) which defined the concept of “Workplace Know-how.” New Standards worked from this foundation and from comparable international work to produce its own “Framework for Applied Learning” (New Standards, 1994). The Applied Learning performance standards have been built upon this framework.

At about the same time the New Standards edition of these performance standards was published in 1996, the New York State Department of Education published its Draft Framework for Career Development and Occupational Studies. These performance standards align closely with the State’s framework which was also built upon the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (1992). The overlap is especially strong between these performance standards and the universal foundation skills and integrated learning elements of the State’s framework.