New ACT Study Reveals the Importance of Being on Target
for College and Career Readiness before High School!
for College and Career Readiness before High School!
A recent ACT report, The Forgotten Middle, suggests that in the current educational environment, there is a critical defining point for students in the college and career readiness process—one so important that, if students are not on target for college and career readiness by the time they reach this point, the impact may be nearly irreversible. This point is 8th grade. Surprised?
According to the report, the level of academic achievement that students attain by eighth grade has a larger impact on their college and career readiness by the time they graduate from high school than anything that happens academically in high school. The report also reveals that, on average, eighth-grade students who are not on target for college and career readiness are much less likely to be ready for college and career by high school graduation than eighth-grade students who are on target.
The study goes on to say that eighth-grade achievement is the best predictor of students' ultimate level of college and career readiness by high school graduation—even more than students' family background, high school coursework, or high school grade point average. Compared to eighth-grade academic achievement, the predictive power of each of the other factors was small, and in some cases negligible.
Based on this information, middle level students must master the following non-negotiable knowledge and skills:
English
- Organization, unity and coherence in writing
- Word choice in terms of style, tone, clarity and economy
- Sentence structure and formation
- Conventions of punctuation
- Basic operations and applications
- Probability, statistics and data analysis
- Concepts and properties of numbers
- Expressions, equations and inequalities
- Graphical representations
- Properties of plane figures
- Measurement
- Main idea and author's approach
- Supporting details
- Sequential, comparative, and cause-effect relationships
- Meaning of words
- Generalizations and conclusions
- Interpretation of data
- Scientific investigations
- Evaluations of models, inferences, and experimental results
*Non-negotiables are taken from an article written by Amanda Karhuse, NASSP, 2009
Portions of this blog entry were copied from the ACT website.
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