California Embraces ACT’s Curriculum-Based Philosophy

I appreciate the invitation President Atkinson extended to ACT and others to entertain ways in which we might be helpful to UC and to the state of California as they look to the prospect of enhancing admissions testing. Clearly the process of admitting students to college is a very important task, perhaps one of the most important each institution faces. It has a huge impact on students, on the institutions, on the well-being of the state—even on the health of the nation. So there is no topic more deserving of the scrutiny and the attention it is receiving now. And we at ACT certainly are delighted to be a part of the dialogue.

You won’t be surprised if I suggest to you that the ACT Assessment is an achievement test. Its roots are in that particular orientation. We believe that the ACT directly addresses the very concerns that have been so well described, defined, and discussed here in recent months—that students should be examined on the basis of achievement, not aptitude; that standardized tests should be clearly linked to specific subjects taught in high school; that in the admission process, schools should look at students as complete individuals and use test results appropriately in making decisions. These are some of the very basic principles that we have been concerned with since ACT’s founding more than 40 years ago.

After having reviewed the California standards and the A through G requirements and others that the system has, we acknowledge that the ACT is not the total answer. However, I believe it would be an eminently doable task to augment the ACT in ways that would make it a very effective tool for addressing many of the concerns you have identified.

The tests in the ACT Assessment are achievement oriented and curriculum based. This means that their content is based solely on the academic knowledge and skills typically taught in high school college-preparatory programs and required for success in the first year of college. The ACT measures achievement in the core curriculum areas critical to academic performance and success. For this reason, ACT Assessment scores are extremely effective for making not only college admissions decisions but also course placement decisions.

The four tests in the ACT Assessment cover English, mathematics, reading, and science. Here’s a short overview of each of the tests, since I know some members of the audience are not so familiar with the ACT as they are with the SAT.

English measures understanding of the conventions of standard written English and of rhetorical skills. Spelling, vocabulary, and rote recall of rules of grammar are not tested. The test consists of five prose passages, each of which is accompanied by a sequence of multiple-choice questions. Different passage types are used to provide a variety of rhetorical situations. Passages are chosen not only for their appropriateness in assessing writing skills but also to reflect student interests and experiences.

Mathematics is designed to assess the math skills students have typically acquired in courses taken up to the beginning of grade twelve. The questions require students to use reasoning skills to solve practical problems in mathematics. Knowledge of basic formulas and computational skills are assumed as background for problems, but complex formulas and extensive computation are not required. The material covered on the test emphasizes the major content areas that are prerequisites to successful performance in entry-level courses in college math.

Reading measures reading comprehension. Questions ask students to derive meaning by referring to what is explicitly stated and reasoning to determine implicit meanings. The test includes four prose passages representative of the levels and kinds of text commonly found in college freshman courses. Notes at the beginning of each passage identify its type (e. g., prose fiction), name the author, and may include brief information that helps in understanding the passage.

Science measures interpretation, analysis, evaluation, reasoning, and problem-solving skills required in the natural sciences. The test presents seven sets of scientific information, each followed by a set of multiple-choice questions. The scientific information is conveyed in one of three formats: data representation, research summaries, and conflicting viewpoints.

The content and skills measured by the ACT Assessment are determined by our nation’s school and college faculty. Every three years, we conduct a National Curriculum Study™, the only project of its kind in the nation. We examine what is being taught in our nation’s schools and what students should know and be able to do in order to be ready for college-level work. A nationally representative sample of teachers in grades seven to twelve plus college faculty who teach entry-level courses in English, mathematics, and science participate in this project.

The study group includes California educators. The specifications for the ACT Assessment are based directly and substantially on the results of these curriculum studies.

Because the four tests in the ACT Assessment are based on school curricula, the scores not only provide normative information (that is, how well a student performed on the test relative to other students), but also tell students what they are likely to know and be able to do based on their performance. These statements, called Standards for Transition, describe the skills and knowledge associated with various score ranges for each of the four tests. Students can compare their performance to that of other students and can refer to the Standards for Transition to identify their own areas of strength and weakness.

Across the country, high schools, colleges, and state education agencies are also using the Standards for Transition. High schools are using the Standards to place students in courses, evaluate their course offerings, plan instructional interventions, evaluate student progress, and prepare their students to meet college expectations. Colleges and state higher education agencies are using the Standards to effectively articulate their academic expectations for entering students, set appropriate scores for placing students in entry-level courses, and identify students who have the skills necessary to enter a particular institution and succeed in the courses it offers.

I would like to focus briefly on a couple of notions that we think are important to the UC institutions and to postsecondary institutions in the state and across the nation. We recognize that many factors contributed to the decision the Regents recently made for the comprehensive review. The admissions level is consistent with our perspective that there are many different variables one can entertain in any particular system of admission. We believe that the ACT does address significant academic skills that are pertinent and important to these considerations. Later in this conference, one of my colleagues will speak directly to the validity of the ACT. I won’t touch on that now, but I will observe that a major benefit of the ACT is that not only does it focus on achievement, but it is also a very effective predictor. The claim that an achievement test would not be an effective predictor of how students will perform in college is simply inaccurate.

I won’t go into great detail about all the different uses now being made of the ACT, both nationally as well as here in California. But admissions selection is certainly one of the most prevalent. We know that’s a critical issue for the UC system and we believe the ACT addresses it very well. Course placement is an issue we also address effectively in different settings. Support for student advising—particularly providing information to students that enables them to prepare themselves early and well for college—is a hallmark of what we have been doing at ACT in the whole area of assessment.

We acknowledge that in California and, in fact, in states around the nation, many students—particularly those in urban and rural schools—are disadvantaged in some way with respect to the adequacy of their educational experience. We believe very strongly that achievement differences, including those that we observe today, can be addressed, minimized, and ultimately eliminated if all the right forces are brought to bear. We believe that educational and career guidance is an important element in helping all interested parties—be they students, parents, counselors, or teachers—become aware of what needs to happen if students are to make successful transitions to postsecondary education and work. Colleges and universities care deeply about whether the students they admit will persist to graduation and they are also concerned about the many factors that can jeopardize student success. ACT has long believed that it is good practice to consider several sources of information besides test scores in making admission decisions. For this reason, the ACT Assessment provides information about a number of non-cognitive characteristics, such as out-of-class activities and accomplishments, leadership, career interests, education and career plans, and expressed need for help. Such information can be used to identify students who are likely to persist in college, and to address areas of interest and need students themselves perceive. Many colleges also use this information for course placement, scholarship selection, career counseling, academic advising, institutional research, recruitment, and enrollment management.

Obviously, rigorous courses are a very significant issue. As many of you know, for years we have reported the fact that roughly two-thirds of all students applying for postsecondary education actually have taken the core courses—four years of English and three of math, social studies, and science. To this day, that is the case. Again, a well-constructed assessment and admissions program can inform good decisions by students, parents, teachers, and counselors. We believe that if we really are serious about ensuring that all students have maximum opportunity for consideration at the point in time when they are being admitted to college, a lot of steps have to be taken much earlier on in the process.

ACT has had a long-standing commitment to fairness in testing. We recognize that societal inequities affect the quality of education in every state and across the country. Not all schools received equal economic resources; not all schools provide equal quality education; and not all students get the instructional support they need to be equally well prepared to enter college. Our goal in developing the ACT Assessment—and all of our tests—is to make sure that no additional inequities are introduced into the test design, development, administration or scoring processes that might create an unfair advantage or disadvantage for one student or group over another.

All the concerns we have been discussing motivated us to create the ACT Educational Planning and Assessment System—EPAS^®. This integrated system begins at grade eight with a program called EXPLORE^®, includes a program at grade ten called PLAN^®, and concludes with the ACT Assessment at eleventh or twelfth grade.

We chose the names for the programs in EPAS very thoughtfully. Our belief is that the eighth grade is a key time. Young people ought to be exploring, ought to be getting information and insight about career paths they might consider taking. At this age, it is much too early to decide on what they may be, but students ought to be exploring and learning. So, our system includes both interest and academic assessments which help students begin to focus, to recognize that if they aspire to be an engineer or a teacher, decisions they make now, decisions their parents, counselors, and others make, will affect their ability to realize their dreams later on. Bad decisions—not taking the right courses, not learning the skills that they need—will work against them in that regard.

At the tenth grade, in the PLAN program, the message is that it is time to begin getting more serious, to start making plans for life after high school, and to choose courses with those plans in mind. At this age, so many young people simply stop taking math courses, stop taking science courses—often making such choices uninformed about the personal consequences of these decisions.

The programs in EPAS are linked in a system that includes the assessments, interpretive information, student planning materials, and instructional support. Information is also provided through a program evaluation dimension for schools and for individual teachers, so that at the classroom level, math teachers, science teachers, English teachers all have very specific feedback that speaks to the skills the students have or do not have and then facilitates changes they may need to make in their instructional strategies.

Our aim with the Educational Planning and Assessment System is simply to help students and schools set and achieve standards for learning. It will not come as any great surprise to you that we have matched ACT content and the standards that are reflected in EPAS to the California standards and requirements and have found that there is huge overlap. That does not surprise us either, because we regularly speak to teachers, to professors, and to others who tell us what is important, what should be covered by our achievement measures. Our shared aim, then, is to ensure readiness for postsecondary education and to monitor student progress over time toward that goal.

We have put all the EPAS programs on the same score scale—for those of you who are not familiar with the ACT, our score scale is 1 to 36. Of eighth graders who complete the EXPLORE math test and score 11, we know that had they taken the much more difficult ACT Assessment that day, they would have scored an 11 on it as well. The message to students is that, depending on what you do in the next three or four years, you can move up from the 11 you’d have scored had you taken the ACT Math test today. You can actually improve on that score. We have enormous amounts of data now that indicate—depending on patterns of course-taking between eighth grade and twelfth grade—how you might perform on the ACT Assessment as a twelfth grader. The challenge is getting the message to all young people—be they disadvantaged or advantaged, majority or minority, or just currently unmotivated to take the right path, the more difficult one—that there are future consequences to the choices they make now. The good news is that they can affect what the outcomes will be by making smart choices now.

In many respects, what we at ACT are saying is that we tend to view college admissions as a process, not a point in time. Though an admissions office makes a decision about an applicant on a given day, the reality is that the whole admissions process began much earlier. We believe that early awareness and intervention offer the best assurance that all students will be prepared for the transitions they make after high school, whether to further education or to work. We believe that junior high or middle school is not too soon to begin the career and educational exploration process. The programs in EPAS guide students through a systematic process of career exploration, high school course planning, and assessment of academic progress, to help ensure that they are prepared for college work. EXPLORE, targeted at eighth-grade and ninth-grade students, begins this longitudinal process. PLAN, for tenth-grade students, provides a midpoint review in high school. And the ACT Assessment provides students in grades eleven and twelve a comprehensive picture of their readiness for college.

Longitudinal monitoring of career plans, high school coursework plans, and academic progress can help identify students who need help along the way in career planning, academic achievement, or identifying courses they need to take to be ready for college. If students are to enter college ready to learn and to persist to graduation, they must begin to plan and prepare when they are in middle school. Our belief is that the more well-timed, appropriate, useful information everyone has, the more solid, reliable advice they’re getting, the more likely it is they will be able to choose from among a whole range of those good options we want for all of our children in all our schools

One of the things you will find in your conference packets is a chart describing the skills and knowledge associated with different ACT test score ranges. For example, for students who score in the range of 10 to 14 on the math test, the chart shows the specific skills they would have the capability to perform. Providing that information to teachers along with the scores—and we do that at the eighth grade, the tenth grade and again at the twelfth grade—gives them a huge array of information they and curriculum specialists can actually address. We think this is important to higher education in general. We are really focusing on the success of individual students, and we think that achievement testing, as is represented by the ACT, provides a very effective tool for doing that.

Let me just make a couple of concluding comments. We have matched the ACT to the K through twelve standards at the secondary level and prepared an extensive report that shows very high overlap with those standards. We have done the same thing with respect to the postsecondary institution requirements and the A through G requirements. So we know there is a good fit there. But we also recognize that your interests, as we have heard them expressed over time, suggest a desire for a broader assessment. The need for a writing assessment was something we also heard very clearly this morning.

ACT’s record confirms that we can effectively address the very significant concerns we all have about underrepresented students and the need to prepare them to make effective transitions from high school into the UC system. We believe this can be achieved in a process that honors the interests the faculty have expressed through the work of the BOARS committee and others.

We hope that, as you are considering the challenges you are facing, you will look very closely at the ACT Assessment. It is an achievement testing program that has a long history of very successful use in widely diverse settings throughout the nation. Even more important, it offers many of the attributes that you have so carefully and thoughtfully identified as important to the future of the admissions process in the state of California.