Tamara Sumner describes the Strand Maps service while NSDL co-PIs (l-r) Kaye Howe, Dean Krafft, and Kate Wittenberg listen. Over 50 of NSDL’s leaders met in Boulder this week.

NSDL’s Pathways partners gathered in Boulder, CO on August 1 and 2 to share stories and trade good ideas. NSDL’s Core Integration staff joined staff from the nine Pathways partners at the Boulderado Hotel for an intense day and a half. The Rocky Mountains and Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall were within walking distance, but the group didn’t seem to notice. There was too much possibilty in the air. One of the highlights of the first day was a presentation by Tamara Sumner, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder and the creator of NSDL’s new Strand Maps service.

Back in 1993, when most Americans hadn’t heard of the World Wide Web, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) published a set of educational standards called Benchmarks for Science Literacy. “Project 2061” specified 853 science and math goals that students ought to reach by the time they graduate from high school. In 1996, the National Research Council (NRC) added another set called the National Science Education Standards that spelled out goals for six categories of science teaching. These efforts had a big impact on the state administrators who wrote the performance standards for the No Child Left Behind Act, and they are still in use. NSDL’s Strand Maps, also known as the Concept Map Tool , makes it possible to link any digital collection to these standards.

The Strand Maps service organizes the AAAS benchmarks visually and shows how they interrelate. The “maps” are actually interactive web pages organized by subject. The text of each benchmark is inside a box that is connected with lines to other, related benchmarks. For example, a standard for high school students that says, “matching coastlines and similarities in rock types and life forms suggest that today’s continents are separated parts of what was long ago a single continent” leads to another standard that says, “the solid crust of the earth . . . consists of separate plates that ride on a denser, hot, gradually deformable layer of the earth.”

“The maps show the connections between learning goals,” said Tamara Sumner. “They are important because these linkages are almost entirely missing from the national and state standards.” Each AAAS standard is linked to related resources from NSDL, as well as the NRC standards that are closely associated with it. Users can correlate the NRC standards with state standards through the Achievement Standards Network database.

Several researchers are now using the Strand Maps in imaginative ways. Randi Satcher, a librarian at the combined middle/high school in the small Colorado town of Nederland, put the system on her school’s web site for teachers to use. Portland State University computer science professor Lois Delcambre was inspired by Sumner’s work to build a visual representation of a lecture on databases. But these projects used an older version of Strand Maps that was based on software that many teachers were unable to use. Sumner says that the new version will allow anyone to present their digital collection within the framework of the AAAS standards. Links to the NSDL Data Repository (NDR) are being added this year, she says.