A key aspect of the American Diploma Project (ADP) is that benchmarks are grounded in empirical evidence of what employers and educators actually require of employees and students. The workplace tasks vividly illustrate the practical application of the "must-have" competencies described in the benchmarks themselves, helping states answer questions such as "Why do I have to learn this stuff?"
The workplace tasks aren't meant to describe the quality and complexity of high school assignments. Although the benchmarks and tasks may be used to inform the development of high school lessons, the tasks included here are designed simply to illustrate the intellectual rigor of real-world environments beyond high school and the applicability of the ADP benchmarks in workplace settings.
The workplace tasks were gathered primarily from companies in the five ADP partner states (Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nevada and Texas) whose workforces encompass the fast-growing occupations identified in the ADP workplace study including plant managers; marketing managers; engineers; medical professionals; environmental science technicians; financial, insurance and real estate professionals; machine operators; information technology (IT) workers; service technicians; and teachers. Tasks include:
Most real workplace tasks require employees to use knowledge and skills that are contained in more than one ADP benchmark. Mastering individual skills without understanding their connections to other skills both within and across content areas is inconsistent with what is expected beyond high school, according to those who participated in the research. The tasks therefore illustrate the need to integrate and apply more than one benchmark at a time.
Within each sample, the corresponding English and mathematics benchmarks are called out so that readers may easily recognize how, and in what context, the benchmarks are applied.
See "How To Use the Benchmarks and Samples" for more.
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