Developmental education assessment and placement policies guide how students may demonstrate college readiness and are placed into college-level courses. States and postsecondary systems use a variety of measures to determine a student's college readiness. Often, policies require that students submit scores from a national, standardized test. Some…

ACT® Academy™ was launched in March 2018 as a free online resource to help students improve their academic skills and prepare for the ACT® test. This study provides an early look at ACT Academy usage and its effects on ACT test scores. The authors found that moderate usage (e.g., 6 hours) of ACT Academy's quizzes and practice tests leads to an…

Multiple measures provide additional evidence a student may present, beyond an assessment score, that can indicate college readiness. This resource provides data on multiple measures that may be allowed to determine placement using the following categories: (1) other standardized and normed exams, or locally developed exams; (2) high school…

With the passage of House Bill 1599 in 2019, graduation pathways were established as one of the requirements for high school graduation. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is required by RCW 28A.655.260 to collect and report on graduation pathways data annually. This report includes the unique pathway options, a data…

Background: Researchers suggest benefits for cooperative learning, but often fail to control for choosing to engage cooperatively, ACT scores or early course performance. Objective: To observe the effects of choosing cooperative work on exam performance in an Introduction to Psychology Course, while controlling for early exam performance and ACT.…

Although memory retrieval often enhances subsequent memory, Peterson and Mulligan (2013) reported conditions under which retrieval produces poorer subsequent recall--the negative testing effect. The item-specific--relational account proposes that the effect occurs when retrieval disrupts interitem organizational processing relative to the restudy…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page sheets on a variety of subjects. The topics for this report on College and Career Readiness of English learners include: (1) Percentage Distribution of High School Students Participating in the SAT or ACT Exams by English Learner…

Reflections on the efficacy of pedagogical changes and practices and their effect on student performance are often hindered by incomplete data, small sample sizes, and the confounding variables of multiple instructors and teaching sites. Observations from such retrospective analyses, however, are highly sought after by instructors and…

We examine the impact of a flipped classroom model of learning on student performance and satisfaction in a large undergraduate introductory statistics class. Two professors each taught a lecture-section and a flipped-class section. Using MANCOVA, a linear combination of final exam scores, average quiz scores, and course ratings was compared for…

It is widely accepted dogma that consequential decisions are better made with multiple measures, because using but a single one is thought more likely to be laden with biases and errors that can be better controlled with a wider source of evidence for making judgments. Unfortunately, advocates of using multiple measures too rarely provide detailed…

A college mathematics placement test with 25 basic algebra items and 15 calculus readiness items was administered to 1572 high school seniors, and first college mathematics course grades were obtained for 319 of these students. Test results indicated that more than two thirds of the high school graduates were not college ready, and the test…

While previous research has examined outcomes related to academic rigor, mixed findings have resulted from differing conceptualizations of rigor as well as varying methodological approaches. Defining rigor as those in-class practices and assignments that require students to engage in deep learning and demonstrate cognitive complexity, we use…

Anatomy courses frequently serve as prerequisites or requirements for health sciences programs. Due to the challenging nature of anatomy, each semester there are students remediating the course (enrolled in the course for a second time), attempting to earn a grade competitive for admissions into a program of study. In this retrospective study,…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

Determining student readiness for gateway chemistry courses and providing underprepared students effective remediation are important as student bodies are growing increasingly diverse in their precollege preparation. The effectiveness of the ACT Mathematics Test and the Whimbey Analytical Skills Inventory (WASI) in predicting student success in…