Learning standards is a term used to describe standards applied to education content, particularly in the US K-12

K-12

K–12 is a designation for the sum of primary and secondary education. It is used in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand where P–12 is also commonly used...

 education system. Part of the standards-based education reform movement

Standards-based education reform

Education reform in the United States since the 1980s has been largely driven by the setting of academic standards for what students should know and be able to do. These standards can then be used to guide all other system components. The SBE reform movement calls for clear, measurable standards...

, learning standards are used to create rubrics

Rubric (academic)

A rubric is an assessment tool for communicating expectations of quality. Rubrics support student self-reflection and self-assessment as well as communication between assessor and assessees...

 for assessment

Standards-based assessment

A standards based test is one based on the outcome-based education or performance-based education philosophy. Assessment is a key part of the standards reform movement. The first part is to set new, higher standards to be expected of every student. Then the curriculum must be aligned to the new...

 in many schools; standardized tests are often used for grade-level evaluations, and; standardized exams are used to graduate students in many US schools.

About

Learning standards themselves are developed by state boards of education

Board of education

A board of education or a school board or school committee is the title of the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or higher administrative level....

 and enforced by state education agencies

State education agency

A state education agency , or state department of education, is a formal governmental label for the state-level government agencies within each U.S...

 across the US., in curriculum published by school district

School district

School districts are a form of special-purpose district which serves to operate the local public primary and secondary schools.-United States:...

s where they often take the form of guidelines by grade of what a student can or should be able to do, or possibly even activity level learning objectives.

Learning standards can also take the form of content-specific standards and controlled vocabulary

Controlled vocabulary

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other form of knowledge organization systems...

, as well as metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 about content. There are technical standards for encoding these standards that deal with K-12 learning environments, which are separate from those in higher education

Higher education

Higher, post-secondary, tertiary, or third level education refers to the stage of learning that occurs at universities, academies, colleges, seminaries, and institutes of technology...

and corporate space..