Results are reported for South Carolina students for the four tests of the American College Test (ACT) (English, mathematics, reading, and science reasoning) and the ACT composite. In 1998, the average composite score for the 995,039 graduating seniors in the United States was 21.0. In South Carolina, for the 5,385 students who took the ACT, the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if academic achievement differed among the Piagetian cognitive levels of teacher education students and if these differences interacted with sex, age, classification (e.g., freshmen, sophomores), or ACT scores. Sample for the study consisted of 670 students enrolled in a developmental psychology class.…

This news release reports that college-bound high school students in 2000 have maintained the American College Testing Program (ACT) score level reached in the last years of the 1990s. Data show the composite ACT score to be 21 (on the scale of 1-36) for the fourth consecutive year. A record number of 1,065,138 members of the high school class of…

America's most widely used college admission examinations systematically underpredict the abilities of high school girls, who make up over 52% of the test-takers. Each year more than three million students who plan to attend college take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying…

Whether the shaping of test items can itself result in qualitative differences in examinees' comprehension of reading passages was studied using the Pearson-Johnson item classification system. The specific practice studied incorporated, within an item stem line, references that point the examinee to a specific location within a reading passage.…

Since the occurrence of overprediction of college grades for blacks has been found primarily in studies using SAT scores as predictors, a study was initiated to investigate the overprediction phenomenon when the ACT was used in conjunction with high school grades as a predictor of college GPA. College freshman-year GPA was used as the criterion…

The relationships among students' scores on the American College Test (ACT) Science Reasoning test, their science course work in high school, and their out-of-class accomplishments in science were studied. Data were from nearly one million ACT-tested students in the high school graduating class of 1998. Analyses were done for the total group of…

This study investigated changes between 1987 and 1996 in the proportions of ACT-tested students taking or planning to take high school mathematics and science courses prior to high school graduation. The changes in course-taking patterns among racial/ethnic and gender subgroups were also compared. The seven courses studied were Algebra II,…

This study examined the relationship between student effort and performance on the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP), a standardized measure of postsecondary educational development, while statistically controlling for American College Testing (ACT) Assessment scores, ethnicity, gender, length of time between ACT Assessment and…

This report summarizes ACT assessment scores of students attending Great City Schools (GCS) between 1990-99, examining achievement gaps by course preparation, race, gender, and poverty. Data included ACT composite scores and scores in English, reading, math, and science reasoning. The total number of ACT test-takers increased nationally by 20…

This research investigated course placement decisions for ethnic and gender groups. Success in four standard college freshman courses was predicted from scores on the American College Testing Program assessment (ACT) or high school subject area grade averages (SGA). The number of institutions varied from 13 to 50, depending on the course. Mean…

Whether adjustments to differential prediction observed among sex, racial/ethnic, or age subgroups in a college-level freshman class could be used to improve grade prediction accuracy for these subgroups in future freshman classes was studied. This study is based on the American College Testing program test scores, high school grades, and college…

This study attempted to control differences in achievement when examining omitting tendencies of examinees. Test data of randomly sampled examinees (7 samples of 2,000 examinees each) from one national administration of the ACT Assessment were used. The number of responses omitted per examinee was examined over all examinees and over only those…

This study examined the extent to which selected high school academic variables and noncognitive characteristics of American College Testing (ACT)--tested students explain differential test performance of racial/ethnic and gender groups. Of particular interest was the extent to which the noncognitive variables, over and above course work taken,…