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CoreWork® Diagnostics

Year Introduced

2008

Intended Users

  • Principals and School Leaders: CoreWork Diagnostics guides school leaders through an efficient school improvement planning process that is focused on ensuring students are college and career ready. By collaboratively identifying the strengths and weaknesses within the school, a leadership team can effectively leverage current resources to enhance the core practices that improve student achievement. This benchmarking practice better informs school leaders on the support needed for their teachers.
  • District Administrators: Administrators can benchmark district-level core teaching and learning practices to those of higher-performing school systems, and get a clear picture of how to help schools better serve their students and help them stay on course.
  • State Leaders: With an emphasis on rigorous common standards across states, the push for college and career readiness is receiving national attention. CoreWork Diagnostics can help school systems in a state improve the quality of their core practices and ensure that students are reaching college and career readiness.

Purpose/Description

CoreWork Diagnostics is an online, research-based program that empowers district and school leaders to benchmark their teaching and learning practices against those of higher-performing school systems in order to raise student achievement to the level of college and career readiness.

Volume/Number of Users

District and school leaders in small, medium, and large districts in Arizona, Arkansas, and Texas use CoreWork. Starting in February 2012, CoreWork can be used by any district or school leader in the country.

Additional Facts

  • ACT and the National Center for Educational Achievement (NCEA) are in charge of the program. The NCEA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan ACT organization whose mission is to help K–12 students reach college and career readiness.
  • Comparison with QualityCore®: QualityCore is used to raise the quality and intensity of high school core courses through rigorous ACT course standards, instructional resources, a formative item pool, end-of course assessments, progress monitoring, and professional development. Instead of a specialized, limited curriculum, QualityCore offers five flexible components to improve and align your current high school curriculum and instructional materials.
  • CoreWork Diagnostics is a service designed to foster ongoing systemic improvement of core educational practices. The online service guides district and school leaders through a collaborative and self-reflective process to identify strengths and weaknesses of their teaching and learning systems. The process results in suggested action steps for improving key leverage points that can be built into the school or district improvement planning processes. CoreWork Diagnostics can be supplemented by CoreWork Performance Reports, online data pictures of state assessment data acquired from partnership states.
  • Since its inception, ACT has helped to define and measure students’ college and career readiness, specifically in secondary grades. Defining a meaningful endpoint for PreK–12 education has been a cornerstone activity of ACT for 50 years. Through the development of QualityCore and its work with the Common Core State Standards, ACT has increasingly been involved in helping to define the curricular goals that would provide students with a meaningful “ramp” to college and career readiness by the end of high school.
  • Since its inception, NCEA has identified and studied schools and school systems that outperform their peers at higher performance standards. Defining clear curricular goals is among the most important of the core practices of higher performing school systems. CoreWork Diagnostics (and other NCEA/ACT services) helps district and school leaders study and diagnose their core teaching and learning systems to identify practices or structures that should be improved to impact student achievement.