Nearly Half of ACT-Tested Graduates Aren’t Ready for College Reading

Of the nearly 1.2 million 2005 high school graduates who took the ACT^® test, only 51 percent met the college readiness benchmark score of 21 on the Reading Test. Students who reach or exceed that score are likely ready to handle the reading requirements for typical credit-bearing, first-year college social science courses.

The percentage of graduates meeting or exceeding the reading benchmark in 2005 was the lowest in more than a decade. It peaked at 55 percent in 1999 and has declined since.

Experience reading complex texts in high school is the key to developing college-level reading skills, according to Reading Between the Lines. The report calls for major changes in high school reading standards and instruction. ACT data clearly reveal factors that make a difference in a student’s ability to read at college level. The report suggests that many high school teachers are either not teaching reading skills or not exposing students to the types of texts they will encounter in college and the workforce.

ACT’s findings suggest the ability to read complex texts is the best differentiator between students who are more likely to be ready for college-level reading and those who are less likely to be ready. Across the nation, however, states are virtually ignoring the complexity of texts in their high school learning standards in reading. Most states don’t define the types of reading materials high school students in each grade should be exposed to, and not a single state defines complex texts.

“It is clear that students need to experience more complex reading materials in their high school courses. It is equally clear that students’ reading skills must be developed to progressively higher levels as they move grade by grade through the early years of schooling if they are to be ready for the level of reading in high school needed to prepare them for post-high school education and training,” Ferguson said. “Also, state standards should include specific references to reading skills so they receive appropriate attention in classes across the school curriculum.”

The ACT report defines complex texts and provides a number of sample reading passages that illustrate the six essential features of such texts. These six features, which ACT abbreviates as “RSVP,” are:

• Relationships—Interactions among ideas or characters in the text are subtle, involved, or deeply embedded.

• Richness—The text possesses a sizable amount of highly sophisticated information conveyed through data or literary devices.

• Structure—The text is organized in ways that are elaborate and sometimes unconventional.

• Style—The author’s tone and use of language are often intricate.

• Vocabulary—The author’s choice of words is demanding and highly context dependent.

• Purpose—The author’s intent in writing the text is implicit and sometimes ambiguous.

The report also makes recommendations to educators and policymakers to help resolve problems with readiness for college-level reading, including:

• Revise state standards so that they both explicitly define reading expectations across the high school curriculum and incorporate increasingly complex texts into the English, mathematics, science, and social studies courses in ninth through twelfth grade.

• Strengthen reading instruction in all high school courses by incorporating complex reading materials into courses across the curriculum.

• Make targeted interventions to help students who have fallen behind in their reading skills.

• Provide high school teachers with guidance and support to strengthen reading instruction and to incorporate the kinds of complex texts that are most likely to increase students’ readiness for reading in college and in workforce training programs.

• Strengthen high school assessments so they align with improved state standards and high school instruction across the curriculum.

Revising standards, teaching complex texts, and strengthening assessments are just part of the picture, though, according to other ACT research.

Reading skills often fail to develop as they would be expected to during the high school years. Results from ACT’s EXPLORE^® and PLAN^® assessments indicate that more eighth-grade and tenth-grade students are on track to be ready for college-level reading than actually demonstrate that skill upon graduation from high school. This suggests that students do not continue to develop their reading skills through high school as they did up to the tenth grade.

In other words, many lose momentum in high school.

And even at high schools where reading is included in the curriculum, low teacher expectations can hamper students’ ability to master complex reading skills. The results of ACT’s National Curriculum Survey^®, conducted among thousands of high school teachers across the country in 2003, suggest that high school teachers are more likely to teach higher-order critical reading skills to students they perceive to be college bound than to students they assume are not going to college.

“The impact of low expectations is devastating to students,” said Ferguson. “We have a moral imperative to give all students the opportunity to develop critical reading skills in high school.”