How will Ms. Begay know she is teaching her students everything they need to learn this year?
Page 5: Putting It All Together
Content standards and benchmarks comprise a multitude of skills and identify the things that students should be able to do. Remember, depending on your state, content standards and benchmarks may remain the same across the grades, but performance standards build upon previous years, thereby changing with each grade. Study the table below to see how a connection is made between content standards, benchmarks, and performance standards.
| Content Standards |
Content standards provide a clear outline of the core content knowledge and consists of what students should understand, and be able to do in social studies throughout the course of their K–12 education.
Example: Social studies content standard (history) Name people and major events that have shaped the history of New Mexico and understand how significant patterns, relationships, themes, ideas, beliefs, and turning points in New Mexico, the United States, and world history correlate to the human experience. |
| Benchmarks |
Benchmarks are more specific than content standards and are frequently linked to grade levels. They can be used as instructional units or blocks of instruction that are taught during a grading period or semester to help measure students’ progress toward meeting a standard. Social studies benchmarks for the state of New Mexico are clustered for grade levels K–4, 5–8, and 9–12. Example: Social studies content standard (history) All students will describe how contemporary and historical people and events have influenced New Mexico’s communities and regions. |
| Performance Standards |
Performance standards refer to the level of mastery of the content the student is expected to attain and are targeted by specific grade level. Performance standards are not taught in isolation but rather are dependent on previously learned skills. Teachers must be aware of the specific content standards in order to develop instructional programs congruent with the performance standards. Example: Social studies content standard (history) Performance standard, grade four
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