Core Academic Skills Framework

The development of core academic skills is the traditional focus of primary, secondary, and postsecondary general education curricula and coursework (Nelson Laird, Shoup, Kuh, & Schwarz, 2008). These courses are limited to a small number of academic disciplines that provide a necessary foundation for future learning. Specifically, students need some level of proficiency in reading, writing, and mathematics in earlier stages of learning to be prepared for more advanced learning in subsequent grades or for specialization in postsecondary education and employment (Allen & Sconing, 2005; Handel, 2010).

ACT has long employed an expanded model of college and career readiness that incorporates scientific skills and knowledge in addition to ELA and mathematics. This focus on scientific reasoning and practices is significant because these evidence-based reasoning skills are central to many fields of study and have wide applicability on the job (Jonassen & Kim, 2010; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2008). In addition, ACT assessments have long included science as a separate academic domain because the skills and interest in science are not totally subsumed by mathematics or ELA. With the increased demand for STEM skills, direct measures of science are critically important to prepare students, and use of math or ELA as proxies introduces construct irrelevance and does not provide a substantive validity argument to support inferences about science skills and readiness. The core academic skills framework (presented in Table 2) expands on the current ACT College and Career Readiness Standards (ACT CCRS) by adding STEM and cross-cutting concepts to the current science framework.

The achievement framework also expands on the current ACT CCRS in ELA by adding speaking and listening skills to the English language arts domain (see Table 2). In the United States, oral communication has not traditionally received as much attention in the curriculum as written communication skills, yet it is universally acknowledged as critical for success in both academic and organizational settings (Carnevale, 1990; CCSS, 2010; Darling & Dannels, 2003; Maes, Weldy, & Icenogle, 1997). The practical challenges involved in standardized assessment of speaking and listening may be partially responsible for this narrow accountability focus. The framework emphasizes the important role of language in communication by including a fourth strand that focuses on the linguistic resources necessary for learning and communicating in a range of school and work contexts. This strand extends the focus on Standard English in current ACT assessments to cover knowledge about how language functions to support a broad range of communication activities, such as interacting with classmates and coworkers, expressing opinions, and engaging in dialogue and argumentation. Other leading literacy scholars and frameworks have proposed similar integrated approaches (Derewianka, 2012).

Proficiency in each of these core academic skills greatly facilitates later efforts to develop specialized expertise from major courses and job training experiences (Carter, 2002; Kraiger, Ford, & Salas, 1993).

Table 2. Core Academic Skills Framework

Subject	Domain	Domain definition
English language arts	Reading	The process of understanding and interpreting written text. Guided by specific purposes, readers use knowledge, skills, and strategies to make meaning with and reason logically about a range of texts.
	Writing	The production and use of written language to accomplish a range of purposes, including communication, expression, persuasion, learning, and research. Writers use knowledge, skills, and strategies to plan, draft, and revise a range of texts.
	Speaking and Listening	Producing and comprehending spoken messages. Individuals draw on speaking and listening knowledge, skills, and dispositions to produce meaning in a range of communication contexts.
	Language for Learning and Communication	Knowledge of standard English at the word, sentence, and text levels; special focus on using oral, written, and visual texts in a range of school and workplace settings for collaborating, presenting ideas and opinions, and engaging in dialogue and argumentation.
Mathematics	Number and Quantity	Understanding relationships among number representations, including whole numbers, fractions, decimals, integers, rational and irrational numbers, complex numbers, and quantities represented in vectors and matrices. Applications include creating equivalent forms of numbers.
	Operations and Algebra	Understanding and applying processes to simplify, solve, and perform operations with numbers and variables. Focal areas include solving equations, applying proportional reasoning, and understanding functions.
	Functions	Understanding functions and relations between variables or numbers. These include finding and interpreting domain and range, transformations, maxima and minima, roots and factors, and end behavior.
	Geometry	The understanding of and relationships among two- and threedimensional shapes. Topics include measurement, properties, figure composition, classification, and applying postulates and theorems within and between shapes.
	Statistics and Probability	Understanding and applying processes to calculate and interpret chance, distributions, descriptive statistics, and inferential statistics. Topics include probability, central measures of tendency, confidence intervals, and expected values.
Science	Physical Science	Concepts and applications in chemistry and physics. These include modeling based on systems, particle, atomic, and energy considerations. Considerations of the interactions of objects and energy from the atomic scale up to and including the cosmic scale.
	Earth and Space Science	Concepts and applications in the earth sciences, astronomy, and cosmology. These include models that predict past, present, and future events on Earth and in space using causal relationships and the interactions of matter, energy, and forces.
	Life Science	Concepts and applications in biology and ecology. These include models that explain and predict structure and function on the molecular, cellular, organism, population, and ecosystem scales.
	Science Practices	The practices scientists use to understand and explain the world. Practices focus on the design and use of experiments to collect interpretable data that can serve as evidence for both scientific argumentation and modeling.
	Cross-Cutting Concepts	Concepts common across all domains of science. These concepts link the separate fields of science and promote transfer of knowledge. Together with the practices, they serve as a unifying framework for understanding the world in a scientific way.

Organization of the Framework

The core academic skills framework outlined in Table 2 is hierarchical; at the highest level, it includes the three academic subjects (ELA, mathematics, and science), each of which is organized into a set of academic domains specific to each subject. Most of these domains are so large they might be the focus of an entire course or sequence of courses. Each of these academic domains is then broken down into large strands and more focused substrands. To provide an example, Figure 3 illustrates this hierarchical breakdown for mathematics. Importantly, the terminology of strands and substrands is meant to emphasize the connected, progressive nature of their content. Substrand topics in particular were chosen to highlight distinct progressions of understanding identified in the literature and by expert panels. Each substrand focuses on a sequence of skills, but these skills are supplemented by a comprehensive list of related knowledge, misconceptions, common errors, and strategies in order to provide a richer picture of student learning. The learning information in each substrand is organized into fine-grained progressions that can be aggregated upward to form coherent learning sequences at any desired level of specificity.

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