Explanation of Terms

Alaska Content Standards

High academic standards adopted by the Alaska State Board of Education. These standards are general statements of what Alaskans want their students to know and be able to do as a result of their public school experience. The standards reflect the collaborative work of Alaskan educators and national experts from the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, and are informed by the input of Alaskan teachers and public comment.

Alaska Cultural Standards

Standards endorsed by the State Board of Education serve to encourage enrichment of the content standards. They are used as a guide to ensure that schools are aware of and sensitive to their surrounding physical and cultural environments.

Competency

A student’s ability to apply clusters of standards to execute a particular performance task.

Competency-Based Learning

Competency-based learning has the following components:

• • Learners are empowered to make important decisions about their learning experiences, how they will create and apply knowledge, and how they will demonstrate their learning.

  • Assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for learners that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.

  • Learners receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

  • Learners progress based on evidence of mastery.

  • Students learn actively using different pathways and varied pacing.

  • Strategies to ensure equity for all learners are embedded in the culture, structure, and pedagogy of schools and education systems.

  • Rigorous, common expectations for learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) are explicit, transparent, measurable, and transferable.

Course/Grade Competencies

Competency statements customized to the content of a particular grade level, grade span, or course. These competencies represent the major concept areas within a discipline.

Graduate-Level Competencies

A set of competencies that may include academic and personal success skills in which all graduates of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District should know and/or be able to do.

Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

A guaranteed and viable curriculum (GVC) is one that guarantees equal opportunity for learning for all learners. Similarly, it guarantees adequate time for teachers to teach content and for learners dents to learn it. A guaranteed and viable curriculum is one that ensures that the curriculum being taught is the curriculum being assessed. It is viable when adequate time is ensured to teach all determined essential content.

Informational Text

A rhetorical structure of text designed to convey factual information rather than to tell or advance a narrative, and which characterizes most of the text found in textbooks. Informational text uses lists, comparing/contrasting, cause/effect, graphs and charts, etc.

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Standards

Intended as a companion to content standards, the social studies curriculum standards are an indispensable framework for the implementation of content standards. The standards continue to be structured the following themes of social studies:

• • Culture

  • Time, continuity, and change

  • People, places, and environments

  • Individual development and identity

  • Individuals, groups, and institutions

  • Power, authority, and governance

  • Production, distribution, and consumption

  • Science, technology, and society

  • Global connections

  • Civic ideals and practices