July 27, 2008
Standards Alignment
AIT’s reputation as a quality educational institution and its mission to promote the effective utilization of instructional technology make the agency uniquely qualified to align media with published state and national curriculum standards.
Professional educators and information specialists at AIT watch each video resource and make qualified and direct matches to curriculum standards in all states plus the District of Columbia. AIT does not employ automatic keyword matching technology, which has been losing favor in the education community lately due to unreliable and inaccurate results. The process of creating exact matches is important because:
- Searching by standard must provide valid and useful returns in order for teachers to use this search method.
- Media management reports provide more useful data with exact match data.
- Other search methods, such as keyword searches or subject and grade level browsing, provide broader opportunities to locate appropriate media. Exact matches to standards provide the best matches to grade level and topic and satisfy teachers’ need to develop standards-based lessons.
AIT can match products to national standards, to standards for one state, or to all state standards, according to the needs of the client. An example of AIT’s state standards alignment can be found at the Cracking the Code Web site.