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NAEP Civics Assessment: Students Struggling (The Nation's Report Card: Civics 2010)

The results are in and The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) gives U.S. schools a mixed review in civics. 4th graders (girls performing higher) are scoring best with the highest average score since 1998 while 12th graders are losing ground performing worse than in 2006 and about the same as in 1998. The test is given over time nationally to approximately 30,000 students attending private and public schools across the U.S. The test is designed to measure civic knowledge focusing on the roles and responsibilities of citizenship in America's constitutional democracy.

It will be interesting to see if the focus of Common Core Standards will address this downturn in scores.

Jodi Waugh 

Project Manager

  

Has One Company Really Become the Exclusive Owner of GUIDs on State Standards?

The short answer is no. State departments of education do not issue GUIDs with their academic standards and no one company owns any exclusive rights to standards based on GUIDs.

So what are GUIDs and where do they come from? GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. Another synonymous term is UUID, or Universal Unique Identifier. So basically, there are two terms for the same thing.

GUIDs/UUIDs are defined as a unique reference number used as an identifier in computer software. The term GUID also is used for Microsoft's implementation of the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) standard. The value of a GUID/UUID is represented as a 32-character hexadecimal string, such as {21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}, and is usually stored as a 128-bit integer. The total number of unique keys is 2128 or 3.4x1038. This number is so large that the probability of the same number being generated randomly twice is negligible.

GUIDs are used in all companies that have databases, whether those databases contain state standards, cars, files, webpages, etc. Moreover, any reliable source for state standards will assign GUIDs to each unique standard when creating a database of state standards. Standards, when imported, become part of a company's service or product, so no two companies would have the same GUID for the same standard. When EdGate delivers state standards to a client, they include the EdGate GUID. Moreover, EdGate can easily import alignments with GUIDs from other companies.

Kathleen Ideguchi  

Project Manager

Email Bartering for Your Business 

Dear Publishers,

Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Map

With all the questions that come up concerning Common Core State Standards, it's no wonder clients and users look to us to get the latest news. Our client Verizon/Thinkfinity asked if we had some type of aggregation of information for the status of state implementations of Common Core. Our standards manager, Kristie McCarley, researched this extensively and realized no one had all the information located in one place so she took on the job to gather each states implementation time-lines, state-specific data related to optional changes and links to each and create a state map that links to each states' information. Now our clients can get up to date information on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) anytime they have questions on what individual states are doing and the Common Core states that we have available in our repository. We feel this will be a big help to our clients being able to stay up on the latest news related to the Common Core Initiative and answer any questions they get from their users that come their way!

Please contact your project manager to get more details on where to find our Common Core State Standards map in the Publisher Correlation Center. 

Jennifer Larson   

Project Manager