New Report Provides Guidance for Closing Academic Preparation Gaps

Getting students on track for college and career readiness must start early in their academic career, according to a new ACT report.

“Waiting until high school to address academic preparation gaps is too late for the majority of students who have fallen behind,” said Chrys Dougherty, ACT senior research scientist. “Moving the achievement needle takes time. Our growth analysis shows that students who are far off track, as defined in the report, require more than four years to catch up.”

Dougherty is coauthor of the recently released report, Catching Up to College and Career Readiness, which builds on the findings of a 2008 ACT report, The Forgotten Middle. Both reports show the importance of effective academic preparation prior to high school.

In the new report, ACT researchers used longitudinal state and ACT assessment data to study students who were behind academically in grades four and eight. Results showed that even if students have four years to catch up between grades four and eight or grades eight and twelve, only 10 percent or fewer catch up. The highest performing schools can raise this as much as 30 percent among advantaged student populations and 20 percent in disadvantaged areas.

These results are consistent with the general view that helping students catch up is difficult and time-consuming, said Dougherty. The research underscores the importance of an early start and places an emphasis on prevention over remediation. Getting on a path to college and career readiness is a process that extends throughout a student’s educational experience.

“It is imperative to strengthen early learning in preschool and elementary school,” he said. “If we think of accumulated academic learning as a deep reservoir that takes time to fill, we should allow ourselves more time to fill it. We should strengthen the early grades’ curriculum and improve educators’ capacity to teach that curriculum.”

He said the report reinforces the need for and benefit of longitudinal data systems, which can be used to measure student growth from K through 12, conduct predictive analysis to identify when students are at risk, and evaluate school systems based on the success of their graduates in postsecondary education and the workforce. These systems can help educators and policymakers focus on the long-term solutions necessary to get students on a path to college and career readiness starting in the early grades.

“The finding that students who are far behind rarely catch up in a few years may not be surprising, but its implications should not be overlooked,” he said. “We need to use longitudinal student data to provide information on how much growth is attainable over specific time periods and to analyze the effects of different types of interventions.

“This report confirms the critical importance of strengthening curriculum, instruction, assessment, and intervention in the early grades and continuing through middle and high school to prepare students for long-term success,” Dougherty added.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

ACT researchers offer the following suggestions to educators and policymakers in taking a long-term approach to preparing students for college and careers:

• Efforts to close academic preparation gaps should begin as early as possible, be more intensive, and take as long as necessary. Even if starting early does not reduce the amount of time it takes to help students close the gap, starting earlier gives them more time to do it. Early monitoring of multiple indicators of student readiness and progress is essential to ensure that needed interventions begin soon enough.
• School systems should emphasize approaches likely to have a broad positive effect on the entire student population when sustained over multiple years. For example, educators can provide all students with a content- and vocabulary-rich curriculum beginning in the early years. Such a curriculum is the basis for preparing students long-term for college and careers.
• School systems should also evaluate programs for middle and high school students based on the programs’ effectiveness with students at different levels of academic preparation. A program that works well for one group of students may be less effective with a group that is farther behind and vice versa.
• Policy and practice should be informed by data on the success of real students in actual schools.

RELATED REPORT RELEASED

A recently released ACT research report, Readiness Matters, confirms the importance of benchmark attainment on college success. The goal is not simply getting more students to go to college, but getting them prepared to succeed that matters most and, as Catching Up to College and Career Readiness clearly shows, that must start much earlier to be successful.