Katherine J. Nolan’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

Recently, standards have become the currency of education reform efforts in the U.S. However, there is no international consensus on what constitutes “world-class” education. The New Standards Project has designed research to describe standards in other countries by using the case-study approach of ethnography to collect data (e.g., curricula, texts, exams, student work, and professional views). The review/analysis of the data is organized by a set of fundamental questions, the answers to which constitute a contextualized account of what students are expected to know and be able to do.