This brief explores how the growth of school-day testing has changed the overall population of annual ACT testers to be more representative of all students; it also highlights key insights from school-day testing programs nationwide.

ACT is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help people achieve education and workplace success. To help fulfill that mission, ACT offers school-day testing programs that provide all students with state- or district-funded access to its college readiness and admissions assessment, removing barriers to testing and opening doors to…

Students must choose when to take the ACT for the first time and if and when to retest. States and districts that administer the ACT test to all students must also choose when to administer the test. A key consideration in making these decisions is the impact on scores. Because the ACT is a curriculum-based test of academic achievement, students…

This longitudinal study investigated development in expectancy for success (perceived competence), 3 types of task value (utility, interest, attainment), and 3 types of perceived cost (opportunity, effort, psychological) for engineering students during their first 2 years of college. Latent growth curve models indicated declines in expectancy and…

A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the "biological clocks" of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities metropolitan area, where Minneapolis and several…