Standards and Assessments

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A number of groups are deeply engaged in developing college-ready assessments, which are designed to help increase students’ academic readiness for college by articulating college expectations clearly and enabling schools to develop student competencies accordingly. For example, as part of making college readiness a nationwide goal, the American College Testing organization (also known as ACT), developed its College Readiness Standards for the middle school and high school grades, drawing on extensive knowledge of what students are likely to need to know and be able to do gained through administering its widely used, integrated series of assessments and career planning programs (including the EXPLORE assessment for grades 8 and 9, PLAN for grade 10, and the ACT assessment for grades 11 and 12). More recently, ACT also launched its Quality Core end-of-course assessments in English, math, and science, which are designed to support college-ready high school curricula and are accompanied by course syllabi, suggested sequencing guidelines, model instructional units, and professional development; together, they create an aligned instructional approach that research suggests has real potential to lift student performance⁵². The College Board is currently in the midst of redesigning its Advanced Placement courses and exams in biology, chemistry, and physics, based largely on recommendations by the National Academies in 2002⁵³. The new exams should accelerate improvements in classroom practice in both high schools and colleges.

While assessing students’ college readiness skills, it is critical that stronger links be made between assessments, professional development, and classroom practice. The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) in Eugene, Oregon, for example, is working with more than 40 Urban Assembly public schools and California Early College High Schools to develop the College-Readiness Performance Assessment System (C-PAS), designed to gauge student progress in grades 6–12. C-PAS is a series of classroom assignments (or performance tasks) that teachers incorporate into class work and score with a common scoring guide. Teachers can use the results to consider how well their curriculum is helping students to reason, solve problems, interpret information, conduct research, and generate work with precision and accuracy. Assignments, or tasks, encourage students’ development in these key cognitive strategies over time. The goal of the project is to create formative assessment systems that teachers, schools, and school districts can employ to help ensure students are ready for college.

The Commission also encourages the development of more sophisticated formative assessments for classroom use, along with systems by which teachers can access proven assessments, share techniques and instruments, and collaborate in refining them. At its best, a formative assessment delineates and measures a student’s progress not only against a rigorous standard in totality but against component skills as they fit together. A good assessment, by illuminating the broad spectrum of skills required for mathematics or science success, can inform instruction by revealing strengths and gaps in a student’s understanding and enabling a skilled teacher to calibrate the needed instructional response. Sophisticated, multilayered, and rigorous assessments are the essential counterpart to fewer, clearer, higher common standards, as the former drives accountability and practice in alignment with the latter.