Page 106 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 91

A second example comes from Thuringia, which has a special type of vocational school
(berufliches Gymnasium) for which there is a variant specialization in technology (Technik).
The standards document we have contains aims (Lernziele) for only three domains: information
systems, programming, and operating systems. Thus pre-engineering education here is limited to
IT (see Table 6 for a sample).

Table 6 Sample of the Standards in Thuringia

3. Analysis
Some themes for analysis emerge from the description of the standards documents:

• the use of behavioral and non-behavioral terms
• levels within or among capabilities and knowledge elements
• differences in the level of detail in descriptions of standards
• differences among standards in terms of capabilities and content/contexts in which
these capabilities are to be applied and the mixture of capabilities and content
elements in standards descriptions

We will now examine these in more detail and compare standards documents.

3.1 Behavioral and Non-behavioral Terms
In this analysis I refer to behavioral terms as terms that contain verbs that signify visible actions,
such as explain, use, etc. Non-behavioral terms are terms that contain verbs that signify internal
qualities that must be externalized to be assessed (e.g., understand and know).

The material from South Africa particularly raises the issues of whether standards should be
completely expressed in terms of observable behavior or if, perhaps, certain learning outcomes
can only be described as internal qualities that are not directly visible. The South African
standards are explicitly based on the conviction that every standard must be assessable by means
of the behavior that demonstrates that knowledge or a capability has indeed been mastered. This
is expressed in the term outcomes-based education (OBE), which is a key term in the South
African curriculum documents.

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