Oklahoma Academic Standards Computer Science vs. CSTA: What the Crosswalk Shows

If you teach or plan computer science in Oklahoma, a fair question is how closely the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Computer Science (OAS-CS) line up with the national CSTA K-12 standards. We compared every OAS-CS unit with CSTA, one by one, and this post shares what we found. The full crosswalk is a free download below.

The same comparison for Texas found that nearly half of Texas’s content has no CSTA counterpart. Read the Texas comparison. Oklahoma looks very different.

The Headline Number

Across all 225 Oklahoma Academic Standards for Computer Science (OAS-CS) units, from Grade 1 through the Level 2 (grades 11-12) course:

• 84% (189 units) are a strong match: the same skill, at the same CSTA grade band.
• 7% (16 units) are a partial match: related, but different scope or depth.
• 5% (11 units) are a match at a different CSTA band.
• Only 4% (9 units) have no CSTA equivalent at all.

Oklahoma did not write independent computer science standards that happen to overlap with CSTA in places. OAS-CS was built as a state adoption of the CSTA framework, and the numbers confirm it. For anyone comparing curricula or writing a program justification, that is a meaningfully different starting point from a state whose standards only partially map to the national framework.

Where Oklahoma and CSTA Diverge (A Short List)

Even with 84% strong alignment, a few real gaps showed up:

Storage location choice has no CSTA counterpart. Oklahoma teaches “choose the right storage location” (physical, cloud, shared) as its own standard in nearly every K-8 grade. CSTA has no standard, at any band, that addresses this.

CSTA drops digital etiquette and “communicate/publish data” after grade 5. This is the same structural gap we found comparing Texas’s standards to CSTA, so it is a feature of the CSTA framework itself, not something specific to how any one state adapted it. Oklahoma, like Texas, keeps teaching both skills every year regardless.

How the Comparison Was Done

Every OAS-CS standard was read against the full text of the appropriate CSTA grade band (1A for grades K-2, 1B for grades 3-5, Level 2 for grades 6-8, Level 3A for grades 9-10, Level 3B for grades 11-12). A match was called “strong” only when both standards covered the same skill at the same depth. Many turned out to be near-verbatim, which is what you would expect from a deliberate state adoption.

Download the Full Crosswalk (Free PDF)

The complete standard-by-standard table for all 225 units gives the OAS code, the nearest CSTA code, a fit rating, and a plain-English explanation for every row.

Download the Oklahoma OAS to CSTA crosswalk (PDF)

Also free on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you work with both states, the free Oklahoma, CSTA, and Texas three-way crosswalk lines them up side by side.

This is an independently produced correlation guide. CSTA standard codes are cited as identifiers only; this article and the accompanying document do not reproduce CSTA’s copyrighted standard text (CSTA K-12 CS Standards, Revised 2017, are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Full CSTA standard text is available free at csteachers.org/k12standards. This guide is not endorsed by CSTA, the Association for Computing Machinery, or the Oklahoma State Department of Education.