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Final Report to the National Institute for Standards and Technology

Michigan State University

Award Number: 60NANB12D254

Paul Thompson, Lawrence Busch and John Stone have completed work on the NIST funded project 

“Toward Standards-Literate Citizens: Curricular Materials and Educational Strategies.”The project was 

focused on educational programming, primarily at the undergraduate level, that would enhance general 

awareness of the role that technical standards play in contemporary life and prepare students for 

business, professional, political and home environments that would be increasingly structured and 

affected by technical standards. Our goal was not to promote understanding of particular standards or 

of standardization processes at work in any specific technical domain. Rather, our concept was to 

identify a general knowledge of standards and standardization that could be viewed as instrumental for 

citizenship and full, informed participation in the technically dense civilizations of the 21st century. To 

this end, our initiative was dedicated to learning objectives centering on student understanding of how 

standards are developed and administered, and the role of social, economic and political power in the 

process of standardization. 

The project had three main objectives: 1) to develop and conduct a series of interviews of MSU 

administrators and faculty to determine opportunities for inserting courses or course modules focused 

on our key learning objectives into the undergraduate curriculum; 2) to develop and test modules 

developed with “standards literacy” in mind; and 3) to conduct a project workshop that would 

disseminate our findings and provide an opportunity for interested faculty to present and discuss their 

own ideas on standards education. This report describes project activities and summarizes our findings 

with respect to each of these three objectives.

Project Staffing: The first phase of the project was focused on hiring a graduate student worker and 

finalizing methodology. Kyle Clothier, an MS student in the Community Sustainability program was hired 

in October 2012. Mr. Clothier assisted project leaders with scheduling interviews (discussed below) and 

with collecting and summarizing data from interviews. Mr. Clothier left the project in May of 2013. Mr. 

Ian Werkheiser was retained for the later stages of the project beginning in August of 2013 through the 

project completion date on Sept. 30, 2013. Mr. Werkheiser’s role was to help with logistics, organization 

and general activity for the September 2013 workshop.

Interviews: The three PI’s developed a plan for soliciting input from academic program administrators at 

Michigan State University. Contact was made to each college indicating our project objectives. We 

prioritized colleges with major undergraduate programs in liberal arts. Due to time constraints for the 

project, it was not possible to schedule interviews with administrators from all 18 colleges. Our principle 

for selecting interviewees was simply scheduling availability. Interviews were conducted with deans or 

associate deans at the following MSU colleges: 

1. Agriculture and Natural Resources

2. Arts and Letters
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3. Engineering

4. Law

5. Natural Sciences

6. Nursing

7. Social Science

The interview protocol was to begin with a brief statement project including a summary of the growing 

importance and prevalence of technical standards and our concept of citizen literacy in standards. 

Second, we solicited information on what is currently being done with respect to standards education in 

courses being taught in their college. We also asked if there were any faculty in the college with a 

particular interest or expertise in standards. This stage of the interview was followed by an inquiry into 

their view of the relevance or importance of what we were calling “liberal arts education” in standards 

for their students and their opinion on how such an objective might best be achieved. In every case, 

these open ended questions were covered during interviews, but the interview process was conducted 

so that interviewees were able to raise questions or issues of their own, and in every case the interview 

drifted toward subjects of particular interest to the interviewee. 

As noted below, one key finding in interviews was related to the programs in integrative studies at MSU. 

MSU has a virtually unique requirement that undergraduates must take two courses in each of three 

integrative studies programs: Integrative Studies in the Natural Sciences (offering courses with physical 

(ISP) and biological (ISB) science emphases), Integrative Studies in the Social Sciences (ISS) and 

Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities (IAH), or a total of six courses in all. There was a strong 

consensus among college administrators that these courses would be not only the best place to address 

standards education, but would in fact be the only place within technical curricula at MSU where there 

would be any opportunity to include novel educational objectives for undergraduates that were not 

specifically directed toward specific technical skills or subject matter. Given this finding, we added two 

additional interviews to our schedule, one with the lead coordinator for integrative studies in the 

natural sciences and a second with all three directors of the integrative studies centers. These interviews 

were structured much as those with the academic deans. 

Findings from Interviews: The interviews with deans and associate deans produced a very diverse 

pattern of results that provokes more questions than it answers. In some cases, our respondents stated 

that they had never had more than a vague awareness of technical standards and were unaware of any 

relevance that they might have for undergraduate education. In every such case, these respondents did 

take deeper interest in standards as the interview progressed. Others knew immediately what we were 

talking about, but confessed that little was done within their curricula to provide a more general 

“citizenship literacy” of standards and standard setting processes. Some indicated that specific courses 

would include extensive discussion of standards pertinent to the subject matter or skills being taught. 

The College of Engineering was a surprising exception in that the three administrators interviewed 

agreed that students were given almost no instruction on standards in the curricula, mainly because the 

specific standards relevant to engineering are in such a state of constant change and revision that there 

would be little point in including them. At the same time, Engineering administrators were all of a mind 

that the Engineering curriculum was so overloaded already that there was no room in it for a separate 
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course or module on standards. However, they embraced the idea of incorporating it into Integrative 

Studies.

In at least two separate interviews, administrators seemed unable to get beyond the thought of 

educational standards that would be used to evaluate curricula and instruction, though such standards 

were not a focus of our initial statement or communication. In these interviews we seemed unable to 

communicate the fact that our interest lay in the general role that standards and standard setting 

processes were increasingly coming to play in all walks of life. Although generalization from this limited 

set of encounters would not be warranted, it appeared that these individuals were themselves so 

unfamiliar with the processes of standardization that they simply could not abstract from the specific 

standards with which they were actively dealing in their capacity as administrators of educational 

programs. The idea that a lack of “standards literacy” would be a problem within the faculty itself was 

reinforced by James Kirkpatrick, Dean of Natural Science, who (while endorsing the importance of our 

project) speculated that less than five percent of his faculty would have any idea what we meant by 

standards. Thus one general finding of our interviews was simply that educating the faculty themselves 

would be a necessary task for bringing about any systematic effort at standards education. 

The other general finding was that MSU’s integrative studies program represents an important 

opportunity for moving standards education forward. This suggestion was brought up spontaneously in 

several interviews, and all of the administrators we spoke with (or at least those who seemed to have a 

clear understanding of what we talking about) endorsed integrative studies as an ideal target for a 

standards education initiative. As noted, we scheduled follow up interviews with integrative studies 

directors. Findings from these two sessions support what has been said already. Directors of MSU 

integrative studies centers agreed that the work on standards would be well suited to INS, ISS and IAH 

courses, and added the further idea that a standards focus would be useful for their own objective of 

enhancing the integration across natural science, social science and arts & humanities disciplines. The 

main barrier would simply be the lack of standards literacy among the MSU faculty teaching integrative 

studies. Further interactions with integrative studies programs provide the most promising avenue for 

further development of the PIs’ standards initiatives. 

Standards Teaching Modules: As specified in the original proposal, the project included development of 

standards “modules” that could be used in undergraduate courses. In preparation for developing 

modules, the team surveyed existing materials, including educational modules on standards and the 

standards setting process that are available through ANSI. We were also contacted by Ashley 

DeGiacomo of IP-Shield, a company that has designed a set of on-line video courses that can be used to 

provide training on standards formation and use. She graciously allowed us free access to her 

company’s on-line materials. Busch reviewed each of them carefully and offered Ms. DeGiacomo the 

following frank critical comments: The courses were easy to navigate and well-designed from a technical 

perspective. However, The courses were designed in such a manner as to emphasize ‘the facts’ about 

standards, but they failed to capture the negotiation, debate, and strategic interactions that take place 

in standards making. They also somewhat misleadingly assumed that standards always benefit 

everyone. Yet, even something as simple as the adoption of standard screw threads a century ago, put a 

greater burden on those companies manufacturing what would henceforth be non-standard screws. 
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They had to re-tool their equipment, while those whose screws matched the standard did not. Finally, 

little or nothing was said about the very effective use of standards as industrial policy, as was the case 

for Japan starting in the 1960s and is the case for China today. Of course, none of this should be seen as 

an attempt to disparage her company’s efforts, but rather to emphasize their limitations for use in an 

undergraduate curriculum. Indeed, our assessment of these and other existing materials is that while 

they might be appropriate for individuals who have been charged with a standards related activity for a 

company or technical project, they neither communicate much about the extent and growing role of 

standards as coordinating and governance mechanisms across a wide variety of social domains, nor do 

they provide much insight into the power, politics and strategic aspects of standards and standard 

setting. As such, we deemed these inappropriate for the purposes of a liberal arts model.

We developed two tracks for standards modules. The first is a few simple classroom exercises that might 

be used in a wide variety of undergraduate classrooms for the primary purpose of raising students’ 

awareness of the scope and role of technical standards in daily life. The second is a “case study” of 

standards and standard setting in animal welfare for livestock production systems. 

Busch developed some in-class exercises to illustrate the ubiquity and importance of standards. Both 

involve a set of preliminary readings followed by dividing the class into groups of 3-4 students. The first 

exercise involves asking the students to create a list of all the things in the classroom that are 

standardized. They need not know what the technical details of the standards might be, only that the 

standards must exist. As they complete that task, each group is asked to post their answers on the 

blackboard. However, they are also asked not to post anything already noted by other groups. The 

students identify literally hundreds of standardized objects, but (not surprisingly) never produce a 

complete list. A discussion ensues as to the benefits and problems caused by the ubiquity of standards. 

This is followed by asking the same groups to pick one or two standards and describe (1) what 

assumptions are made about the persons/things for whom the standard is made, (2) what the standard 

enables one to do, (3) what (positive or negative consequences) might happen to those persons/things 

who do not meet the assumptions built into the standard, and (4) how problems might be resolved. 

Each group then reports back to the class for further discussion of the complex technical, ethical, social, 

economic and strategic issues involved.

The second classroom activity focuses on measurement. In small groups students are asked to develop 

their own measures of the width of the room and then to proceed to use that measure to actually 

measure the room. In addition to provoking a great deal of laughter, the exercise and the discussion 

following it allows discussion of among other things (1) the arbitrariness of most measures, (2) the 

varying importance of precision, depending on the situation, (3) the importance of having agreed-upon 

measures for both communicating and constructing things, and (4) the degree to which all technical and 

scientific activity is and must be based on standard measures. (In one instance, a group measured the 

room as 5.5 Kevins wide, where Kevin was the name of one of the students in the group; this allowed 

discussion of the importance of human dimensions in early measurement (e.g., feet).While not the sole 

purpose of the course, these exercises proved very valuable to students in a course on ‘Science, 

Technology and Society.’ As other issues were discussed during the semester, students returned 

questions of metrics and standards. Moreover, as many of the students in the class were majoring in the 
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natural sciences, they began to apply their understanding of standards and metrics to what they were 

learning in those classes. 

Thompson developed a unit on animal welfare standards that he tested in a Fall 2013 Integrative Studies 

in the Arts and Humanities entitled “Technology, Self and Society”. The case was set up by introducing 

students to contemporary animal production methods (recall that the class draws randomly from all 

undergraduate majors). Students toured MSU animal research facilities that have been designed for 

research on pork and egg production, and which are scaled down versions of actual production 

methods. Through readings and discussion, students were introduced to the way that existing methods 

were the target of criticism and projected regulatory reform based on animal welfare. This material 

included an overview of several standards being utilized on food items, including organic and fair trade 

standards. Students were then given an introduction to the concept of standards that would be 

developed around various indicators of welfare, on the one hand, and facility design criteria, on the 

other. Both lecture and readings stressed the basic structure of a standards development process, 

including standard setting and certification by third party organizations. 

The success of the module has been and will continue to be evaluated through three processes. First, 

examination questions (both quantitative multiple choice and open-ended essay) were structured to 

assess student knowledge. Second a pre- and post- module questionnaire was administered to assess 

student learning. Finally, a course evaluation form was developed which included a specific question on 

the animal welfare standards module. While data from the questionnaires is still being analyzed, the 

examinations and course evaluations provide some basis for determining whether the learning objective 

of greater standards literacy was achieved. In general, it is fair to conclude that while students were 

quite interested in the question of animal welfare and were able to articulate problems, they did not 

demonstrate a high level of knowledge with respect to standards as an appropriate or effective 

response to the problems that they had identified. To the extent that student writing and evaluation 

responses addressed standards, they expressed skepticism about the validity of all food-related 

standards. This result may or may not have been an appropriate judgment on current animal welfare 

standards, and it may reflect prejudgments about food-related standards in general. Nevertheless, it 

suggests an equivocal result in terms of the module’s educational effectiveness in cultivating standards 

literacy. 

The Workshop: The final component of the project was a workshop to discuss “standards literacy” and 

to showcase cross-cutting cases for standards education in liberal arts courses. The workshop was held 

September 24 and 25, with keynote presentations by Christine Ervin, former President of the U.S. Green 

Building Council, who spoke on the development and prospects of LEED standards, and Carl Cargill, 

principal for standards at Adobe who spoke on privacy issues associated with information technology 

standards. In addition, the workshop included an overview of the project and presentations from other 

participants dealing with ongoing standards development activity with respect to animal welfare, 

ecosystem services, nanotechnology and submersible vehicles. Participants in the workshop gave highly 

favorable evaluations of the sessions they participated in, and all agreed that standards would be a very 

useful platform for a variety of undergraduate educational activities. The workshop was not successful in 

attracting faculty or students who were not already part of the three PIs’ networks, however. This result 
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provides additional support for a key observation drawn from our interviews: Lack of standards 

awareness even among faculty is one of the key barriers to implementation of standards education for 

the liberal arts.