This report provides and overview of the Austin Independent School District's college readiness outcomes for seniors in the 2020 and 2021 graduation cohorts.

Employing data from a stratified random survey of newly certified teachers in Texas, we compare the mathematical content preparation of traditional teacher program graduates with graduates of alternative programs. We find that graduates of traditional programs have statistically significantly higher content preparation even when taking precollege…

There has been considerable movement in the United States toward an integrated approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) which leverages English/language arts, social studies/history, and the arts as contexts and tools for solving the grand STEM challenges of our society. Selective STEM schools have been demonstrated as…

"Getting Prepared 2019" examines Minnesota public high school graduates from the classes of 2011-2018 who enrolled in postsecondary education and those enrolled in developmental education. This report provides insight into the academic readiness of Minnesota public high school graduates. Developmental education adds to the overall cost…

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is a popular trend in education due to the increased demand from American citizens to include CTE opportunities in schools along with federal funding to build new CTE programs and improve existing ones. Schools are tasked to improve student achievement. Testing performance is a central process to demonstrate…

This quantitative ex post facto study investigated the effects of career academies on academic achievement and college readiness. A total of 1,206 12th-grade participants (196 career academy and 1,010 nonacademy students) were used in this study. These participants came from six high schools located in one large urban school district. Each of the…

This study is an extension of two previous studies that provided profiles of persisting STEM majors overall (regardless of academic performance) and persisting STEM majors who earned semester GPAs of 3.0 or higher (Westrick, 2016, 2017). Using data from 25 four-year institutions, this study compared the mean ACT assessment scores, HSGPAs, and ACT…

In this study, we investigated whether preequating results agree with equating results that are based on observed operational data (postequating) for a college placement program. Specifically, we examined the degree to which item response theory (IRT) true score preequating results agreed with those from IRT true score postequating and from…

This paper presents and reviews gender, racial/ethnic, language, and socioeconomic subgroup performance differences on the SAT® over nearly the last two decades. Theories on the existence of subgroup differences are examined. Substantial revisions to the SAT were made in 1994, and again in 2005. The short-term and long-term impact of these…

This report presents a comprehensive look at girls' educational achievement during the past 35 years, paying special attention to the relationship between girls' and boys' progress. Analyses of results from national standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the SAT and ACT college entrance examinations,…

It is generally agreed upon that in order to be an effective, contributing member of society one must work. The current axiom in education today revolves around preparing students to be college and career ready, with the ultimate goal of preparing students for the workforce but very little research has gone in to identifying the most effective way…

Annually, ACT provides each state with "The Condition of College & Career Readiness," a report that details the college readiness of students who took the ACT[R] test. Based on extensive empirical research, ACT has defined "college and career readiness" as the acquisition of knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll…

The composite American College Test (ACT) scores of 7,928 Nevada students (University of Nevada Office of Counseling and Testing data for the years 1968, 1970, 1971, and 1972) were used as a measure of district educational quality to investigate the relationships between educational quality and various factors hypothesized to have an effect upon…

Group differences among ethnic and racial groups on a series of educational measures and outcomes are examined. African-American and Hispanic students perform substantially lower than white and Asian students on the SAT I. These substantial differences also exist on a variety of other admissions tests used for undergraduate, graduate, and…

This paper presents the results of a survey of 127 seniors in a diverse suburban high school to determine the impact of the subjects' perceptions of parent involvement on their levels of achievement as measured by the standardized national ACT test. Independent-samples t tests were then used to assess whether there were any differences in…