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This volume contains the first New York City edition of the New Standards™
Performance Standards for Science. 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 Science. The first New York City editions of the New Standards™
Performance Standards for Language Arts and Mathematics were published
in 1997 and 1998 respectively. A volume focusing upon Applied Learning
is in preparation.
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.
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?
The performance standards for Science were based directly on the content
standards produced by the National Research Council (1996) and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (1993).
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