Academic Preparedness is not College Readiness

“College readiness” is the new mantra. And not surprisingly, there’s a scramble on to develop the measures that define what readiness actually means.

The two assessment consortia seek to make the scores from their new assessment systems align directly with readiness. The PARCC consortium, for example, lists “Build a Pathway to College and Career Readiness for All Students” as the first bullet in its visioning statement. And, ACT has a whole product line of tests and related research dedicated to measuring and tracking/predicting college readiness. But, there’s a danger to entirely assessment-based measures of college readiness. These indicators are critical, but they don’t measure everything research shows students need to actually succeed in college.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Technical Panel on 12th Grade Preparedness Research helps to explain:

Preparedness represents the academic knowledge and skill levels in reading and mathematics necessary to be qualified for placement into a job training program (for the workplace context) or into a credit-bearing entry-level general education course that fulfills requirements toward a two-year transfer degree or four-year undergraduate degree at a postsecondary institution (for the college context). Academic preparedness is separate and different from college readiness because readiness encompasses behavioral aspects of individual performance related to success in addition to academic skills, and these additional attributes are not measured by NAEP. Examples of readiness characteristics include persistence, time management, interpersonal skills, and knowledge of the context of college.

While this may seem like a semantic argument, it’s not. If we say college readiness, but only focus on academic preparedness, then we’ll likely undervalue and under-invest in critical elements of college readiness.

Tagged as: Assessing College and Career-Readiness, Assessment, College Outcome Measures, College Success, College-Readiness, High Schools, Student Data, Testing