Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

Our qualitative research study was designed to examine whether a set of cross-curricular learning processes could be found in the respective US national standards for math, language arts, foreign language, science, social studies, fine arts, and technology. We found that all K-12 subject matter standards could be analyzed and synthesized into 13 common learning processes.

This superset of 13 learning processes may argue for the increased need for instruction which integrates various content areas. Recognizing that learning of most subject matter is more similar than different, it becomes more difficult to argue that all subject matter instruction and learning should be experienced disjointedly. In the future, if the superset of 13 learning processes became the basis of the national standards, curriculum could be reconceptualized so that teachers taught processes rather than content areas.

Standards developers
Those who develop standards have a great deal of influence on future directions in education. If these individuals were to shift their focus to the processes involved in learning, modifications could be made to content standards in social studies, language arts, and fine arts, to provide greater influence of the processes involved, as is currently done in the science and math standards. The existence of a broad cross-curricular set of learning process standards would allow for all national K-12 standards to be mapped onto the same set of learning processes. Such a mapping would enable teachers and other developers of curriculum to observe the interrelatedness of seemingly non-related content, according to the shared learning processes. At some point, national standards should be written either entirely as learning process standards, or mapped as process standards in coordination with content standards so that teachers can more easily observe the relationships between content and process.

Curriculum developers
As they translate standards into lesson plans and units, curriculum developers without a strong sense of the learning processes underlying the content will have difficulty constructing curriculum that meets the level of rigor demanded by the standards. If a set of K-12 national process standards existed, however, the desired rigor could be retained due to the fact that the language of the learning processes would be stated explicitly in the standards, rather than implicitly hidden beneath the content.

Teachers
Educators should familiarize themselves with the thirteen learning process standards to determine how the processes can be used to relate seemingly unrelated content. Curriculum delivery should include all of the thirteen learning processes ranging from the more teacher-led (skills & practice) to the more student-led (exploration / problem-solving) providingteachers with multiple pathways for increasing student understanding of content.

Teacher educators
Teacher educators must also be familiar with the learning processes that underlie curriculum as they instruct pre-service and in-service teachers in the development of curricular materials and instruction. If standards were based primarily on learning processes, rather than content standards, a greater focus would be brought to the pedagogy of teaching and would perhaps minimize the occurrence of tedious lectures based only on content coverage with little regard to instructional method.

Assessment
In an era of high stakes standardized testing, discussions regarding assessment practices could be founded upon student learning rather than countless facts associated with subject matter. 21st Century learners must continually learn how to continually learn. Based on national standards on learning processes, educators working in unison across all disciplines may be able to use these learning standards to evaluate a student‘s subject matter mastery, ability to learn, and progress as a life-long learner. These latter two dimensions may better speak to the goals of education than the temporary learning of facts that may or may not be employed in the future.

Education today is fractured by segregation according to subject matter. By utilizing the superset of learning processes, educational discussions, investigations, planning, and development can be unified giving educators and curriculum developers a new platform from which to write integrated, multi-dimensional 21st Century curriculum.