Student Indicators of Inadequate College Readiness

There are many complex dimensions for assessing college readiness of secondary school students. This is a follow up to my last blog concerning David T Conley's paper for Gates Foundation. Many students consider their personal beliefs sufficient justification for their opinions, and view any challenge as a personal attack. Unprepared students resist solving problems with ambiguous or multiple solutions. They look for the right answer among two conflicting conculsions , rather than analyzing the clues in the text about the authors motivations or historical context. In short, their high school work displays no deep understanding of complex technical reading.
States have been trying to ameliorate these problems by merely requiring more years of English and social studies. But this will not solve the proble. Research has shown that what is in the courses matters more than the label. Recent studies of huge samples of high school seniors by ACT confirms this view.

Labels: College Readiness