With the pressure in education to develop a 21st century learner with higher-level thinking skills, many educators connected previous state curriculum to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Missouri's Department of Education experts paired the previous state's curriculum known as the Missouri Grade Level Expectations (MO GLEs) with a corresponding CCSS based on Webb's depth-of-knowledge model in a document commonly referred to as the Missouri Crosswalk. This quantitative content analysis study compared the MO GLEs and CCSS by quantifying the language using an adapted and revised Bloom's taxonomy framework. This study tested for a cognitive difference in means and for a possible relationship between the two documents using the Missouri Crosswalk in each grade level from 1-5 in the areas of English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics (MA). This study revealed no overall difference in means between the MO GLEs and the CCSS within the content areas of ELA and MA, grades 1-5. Although the results seemed as though CCSS did not offer more higher-level thinking opportunities than the MO GLEs, the researcher noticed a trend in the amount of objectives assigned in each cognitive category. In a further analysis that divided the objectives into higher-level and lower-level thinking, the results showed CCSS generally had more higher-level thinking opportunities than the MO GLEs. The contradicting results showed the importance of closely analyzing the two documents in order to adjust instruction. This study also revealed no cognitive relationship between the paired CCSS and MO GLEs aligned in the Missouri Crosswalk for all grades in both ELA and MA with the exception of fifth grade ELA. The structural difference in the ELA and MA crosswalk prompted an investigation of the objectives labeled "direct alignment" found only in the ELA crosswalk. The result showed no relationship between the higher-level thinking skills in the ELA GLE and the "direct" paired CCSS in all grade levels except fourth grade. Generally speaking, when adjusting instruction based on the objectives labeled "direct", only grade 4 ELA teachers may find the Missouri Crosswalk helpful since it was the only grade level to show a cognitive relationship. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]