Unleashing the Usefulness of Educational Resources through Mining of Educational Metadata

While there is a strong movement to develop new educational resources to bring students to the competencies represented by educational content standards, it is recognized that there are vast repositories of educational resources already developed that are suitable to address those competencies. However, these resources need to be indexed by national and state standards to make them accessible for teachers who are increasingly required to teach to certain educational standards (Diekema and Chen, 2005). In the early 1980s, a perceived a crisis in the American education system encouraged the creation of national standards by professional subject-area organizations such as the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. These national standards aimed to clearly define what students in certain grade levels are expected to know in core subject areas (Ratvitch, 1995). Eventually all states followed suit and published their own educational standards, often using the national standards as a guideline.