College Freshman Success Reports Inform Programs on Both Sides of Graduation

ACT researchers are uniquely positioned to create such reports. By tapping information collected when high school students take the ACT Assessment and working with interested colleges and state agencies, they can create customized College Freshman Success Reports that help everyone interested in a student’s successful transition to college.

“We really appreciate the work ACT went to to move to this system of reporting,” said Robert Loveridge, senior research analyst at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. “These reports have helped open a dialog between the high schools and the postsecondary institutions. That’s not to say there isn’t still a lot of work to do there, but these have been tools to help open that discussion.”

Improving K-16 articulation is one of several goals ACT aims to meet with the reports.

“We want to raise awareness in the minds of students, parents, and administrators at the high school level that proper college readiness is highly correlated with the kinds and the difficulty of courses students take,” said James Maxey, ACT senior research scientist. “We know that with proper preparation in high school, students are more likely to be successful, more likely to persist, and more likely to make reasonable progress toward a degree in college.”

Educators in eleven states have used ACT’s College Freshman Success Reports.

ACT researchers work with each state system to customize the reports they get, although they tend to use a lot of the same data, Maxey said. Data includes ACT Composite scores, high school grade-point average and class rank, whether students took core-curriculum college preparatory courses, the college in which students enrolled, the first-year college grade-point average and number of credit hours completed.

“Now we’re looking into providing information by score ranges that correlate to our Standards for Transition^® and by Benchmarks for College Readiness,” Maxey said.

In Utah the information is used by colleges:

• To create a snapshot of the students coming into an institution
• To compare profiles of typical students from different high schools
• To gauge the effect of taking core curriculum courses in high school
• To measure the effectiveness of remedial courses in the first year of college
• To inform discussions about recruitment

The “feeder school” report is particularly useful, Loveridge said, because it gives Utah State a more accurate idea of the services some of its incoming students might need.

“We’re able to see how effective our advisement is for the students who need some kind of skill-building coursework when they come to us. We can show the advisors the importance of taking care of academic deficiencies early,” he said. “If we don’t want our institution to be a revolving door for those students, we have to put something in place to help them succeed. We want to be sure these students don’t come and after one semester walk out because they’ve had a bad experience.”

The colleges discuss the reports with their high school colleagues, too. One principal was “absolutely astounded” when Loveridge showed him the gap between the number of his students who indicated when they took the ACT Assessment that they planned to go to college and the number of students who actually enrolled. About 25 percent of the students were unaccounted for. “The principal said, ‘We need to be talking to our high school counselors about why they aren’t going to college, and try to get some resources to help them get there,’” Loveridge said.

Bonnie Laugerman is a principal of a high school in Hartland, Wisconsin. She uses ACT’s College Success Reports along with ACT Assessment data and her school’s own one-year followup studies to see if her school is helping students make informed decisions about their plans. The importance of a core curriculum—four years of English and three years each of mathematics, science, and social science—is clear in the data.

“We learned that our students who have non-core courses do not do as well as similar students from other schools. This helped us adjust our curriculum as well as assist students in their post-high school choices,” she said.

Core-course data caught the attention of Marshall, Wisconsin, School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell, too. Gorrell said he was surprised by how few graduates had taken core courses. He thinks students will be surprised, too.

“I think the biggest bang will be with the kids. It is instructive for our parents to see this information, but definitely it is good for our kids to see it,” said Gorrell. He knows exactly what he wants to tell the students when the reports are presented to them.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise, students, when you don’t take core courses, that you don’t do very well in college. The message there is: Take as much as you can while you’re in high school.“

For more information on ACT’s College Success Reports contact James Maxey at 319/337-1100.