Using a dataset of over 16 million students who took the ACT® test, we examined occupation choice trends from 2012 to 2023. Students increasingly were undecided or selected occupations in Finance, Computer and Information Sciences, and Math/Quantitative areas. Students decreasingly chose Pharmacy, Communications, Visual and Performing Arts, and…

Developmental education courses have been designed to support underprepared students, as they attempt to bridge the gap in academic knowledge among students who enter postsecondary education underprepared for college-level coursework. The effectiveness of these programs, however, particularly in terms of promoting degree attainment, remains an…

This study aims to characterize how students enrolled in a test preparation product, ACT® Online Test Prep (AOP), use that product. Following Geiser (2012), Masyn (2013), and Morin (2016), the authors use latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify students' engagement profiles using four engagement measures: activity, time, practice ACT score, and…

There is a tradeoff between scale length and psychometric concerns. The two are, in fact, directly linked. Generally, when scales are shortened, reliability is reduced, and when scales are lengthened, reliability is improved, provided the items added to the scale are comparable psychometrically (AERA et al., 2014). Scale reliability, in turn,…

Debilitating test anxiety is a general threat to validity if it biases assessment scores. Moreover, if bias differs between demographic groups, anxiety also raises concerns about test fairness. This study applied structural equation modeling to investigate possible measurement bias due to anxiety on the ACT® assessment and relationships among…

The research summarized in this paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student performance on the ACT[TM] test. The author compares scores during the three years preceding the pandemic (2018, 2019, and early 2020) to scores in 2021 and 2022 while accounting for changes in the tested population across years. For students tested in…

This study investigated the moderating roles of motivation, social engagement, and self-regulation in predicting academic achievement in grades 11-12 for 3,281 7th-9th graders. Standardized assessments of college readiness (ACT® Explore and the ACT® test) and student self-report measures of social emotional learning factors (ACT® Engage® Grades…

A random sample of students who took the ACT test in either April or June of 2016 were invited to participate in an online survey via an email invitation (N = 35,0471). To study whether mailing post card invitations to students improves response rates, a portion of these test-takers were randomly assigned to be sent a post card. In addition,…

In recent ACT mode comparability studies, students testing on laptop or desktop computers earned slightly higher scores on average than students who tested on paper, especially on the ACT® reading and English tests (Li et al., 2017). Equating procedures adjust for such "mode effects" to make ACT scores comparable regardless of testing…

For many years, ACT has studied the relationships between high school students' educational experiences and successful educational outcomes, such as college persistence and graduation. As ACT continues this work, there are opportunities to learn about students' other experiences as well, including negative ones that could hinder academic…

This study employs hierarchal linear modeling to examine whether high school grade inflation occurred between 2010 and 2021, including for students who were tested during the pandemic. The study does so while simultaneously accounting for student and school characteristics. This is the first study, to the current authors' knowledge, that makes use…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to the educational system in Nebraska and across the world. At the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, schools in Nebraska were forced to replace on-site instruction with virtual instruction. During the 2020-2021 academic year, many students learned online or under hybrid learning formats.…

Three mode comparability studies were conducted on the following Saturday national ACT test dates: October 26, 2019, December 14, 2019, and February 8, 2020. The primary goal of these studies was to evaluate whether ACT scores exhibited mode effects between paper and online testing that would necessitate statistical adjustments to the online…

This study examined the performance, demographics, and contextual factors of students taking the ACT® test with accommodations compared to students taking the ACT without accommodations. We examined the prevalence of accommodations provided and disability categories as well as performance by disability type. We also examined demographic…

This study examined the value of using measures of academic "tilt" and vocational interest "tilt" to predict whether students will declare a STEM major during their first term in college. Academic tilt looks at students' relative academic strengths by appropriately comparing their math and science achievement levels to their…