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NET Gain No. 5: Skill Standards
(September 1996)

The ongoing work on skill standards is of vital interest to many in the vocational education community. One effort to organize that information is the NCRVE Skill Standards Page. It is not only a source of information, but an illustration of the World Wide Web's power to provide direct access to resources from organizations and in various formats. The Skill Standards Page (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/SkillsPage.html) is compiled from the work of dozens of organizations and maintained by NCRVE staff. The primary contact is Holly Halligan, the person behind the AskNCRVE@ncrve.berkeley.edu e-mail address.

Links to NCRVE resources

The page's first link is to another NCRVE page (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/skillstand.html), which in turn contains links to information about the 22 skill standards projects sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor. In addition to contact information for each project, the page contains links to the projects' own online information (available for roughly half of the projects), and links to the project descriptions that are stored in a database at the Training Technology Resource Center (TTRC), an electronic point of access established in 1991 by the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration. TTRC's skill standards Web site is at http://www.ttrc.doleta.gov/skillstd.html, but links from the NCRVE page automatically perform searches of the TTRC database to retrieve the appropriate project description.

Also on the Skill Standards page are two relevant recent publications from NCRVE: a 79-page report, Making Sense of Industry-Based Skill Standards (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/MDS-777/) and a five-page digest, A Conceptual Framework for Industry-Based Skill Standards (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/CenterFocus/CF11.html).

Links to other skill standards resources

Other organizations have compiled guides to skill standards resources, which are also accessible via the NCRVE Skill Standards Page.

At the SKILLSNET home page (http://steps.atsi.edu/) one can subscribe to the SKILLSNET e-mail discussion group and browse through discussion group archives. SKILLSNET also has links to a number of sites related to skill standards and other occupational, technical, and vocational topics.

Sponsored by the National Center on Education and the Economy (Rochester, New York) and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the New Standards Project page (http://www.ncee.org/files/nsPerf.html) contains a brief description of the project.

The SCANS/2000 page (http://www.jhu.edu:80/~ips/scans/) provides information on the interdisciplinary research group at Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies that is working on projects related to school-to-work and education reform. More links to Web resources can be found here.

The National Standards for Business Education page (http://www.nbea.org/standard.html) is maintained by the National Business Education Association. It contains information on the NBEA's national standards document, "National Standards for Business Education: What America's Students Should Know and be Able to Do in Business."

This "NET Gain" was compiled by David Carlson (NCRVE, University of California at Berkeley), Peter Seidman (NCRVE), and Judy Wagner (ERIC/ACVE, Ohio State University). An online version of this column will be available on the NCRVE World Wide Web server (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/NetGain/). Readers are encouraged to let the authors know about any changes in the resources listed, as well as about other resources they find useful.

Judy Wagner: 800-848-4815; wagner.6@osu.edu
David Carlson: 800-(old phone deleted);
Peter Seidman: 800-(old phone deleted);

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