Preparing Students for College and Careers

Preparing Students for College and Careers addresses measurement and research issues related to college and career readiness. Educational reform efforts across the United States have increasingly taken aim at measuring and improving postsecondary readiness. These initiatives include developing new content standards, redesigning assessments and performance levels, legislating new developmental education policy for colleges and universities, and highlighting gaps between graduates' skills and employers' needs. In this comprehensive book, scholarship from leading experts on each of these topics is collected for assessment professionals and for education researchers interested in this new area of focus. Cross-disciplinary chapters cover the current state of research, best practices, leading interventions, and a variety of measurement concepts, including construct definitions, assessments, performance levels, score interpretations, and test uses. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Katie Larsen McClarty is chief assessment officer at Questar Assessments. She oversees item and test development, publishing, psychometrics, and research. Her own research centers on assessment design, college readiness, standard setting, and gifted education. Krista D. Mattern is a director of ACT's Statistical and Applied Research Department. Her research focuses on evaluating the validity and fairness of both cognitive and noncognitive measures for predicting student success. She is also interested in higher education issues such as college choice, major selection, and college completion. Matthew N. Gaertner is a principal research Scientist in SRI International's Center for Education Policy. His research focuses on college and career readiness and the effects of educational policies and reforms on disadvantaged students' access, persistence, and achievement.

Foreword by Mitchell D. Chester Acknowledgements Introduction by Katie Larsen McClarty, Matthew N. Gaertner, & Krista D. Mattern Section 1: Defining and Measuring College and Career Readiness Chapter 1: The New Complexity of Readiness for College and Careers by David T. Conley Chapter 2: Conceptualizing and Measuring Progress towards College and Career Readiness in Mathematics by William McCallum and James W. Pellegrino. Chapter 3: More than a Test Score: Defining and Measuring Personal Qualities by Matthew N. Gaertner and Richard D. Roberts Chapter 4: The Consistent Influence of General Cognitive Ability in College, Career, and Lifetime Achievement by Jonathan Wai, Frank C. Worrell, and Christopher F. Chabris Section 2: Validating College- and Career-Readiness Performance Levels Chapter 5: Building External Validity into the Process: Evidence-Based Readiness Standards by Katie Larsen McClarty, Susan Cooper Loomis, and Mary J. Pitoniak Chapter 6: Empirically-Based College- and Career-Readiness Cut Scores and Performance Standards by Wayne J. Camara, Jeff M. Allen, and Joann L. Moore Chapter 7: College Placement Strategies: Evolving Considerations and Practices by Elisabeth Barnett and Vikash Reddy Chapter 8: Fairness Issues in the Assessment of College and Career Readiness by Rebecca Zwick Chapter 9: Mixed Messages: When Different Assessments Yield Different Results by Krista D. Mattern and Matthew N. Gaertner Section 3: Improving College and Career Readiness Chapter 10: Early Intervention in College and Career Readiness: The GEAR UP Model and its Implications for 21st Century Education Policy by Chrissy Tillery and Brent Duckor Chapter 11: Multiple Mathematics Pathways to College, Careers, and Beyond by Francesca Fraga Leahy and Carolyn Landel Chapter 12: Supporting College and Career Readiness through Social Psychological Interventions by Kathryn M. Kroeper and Mary C. Murphy Chapter 13: Changing the Assessment Relationship to Empower Teachers and Students by Margaret Heritage Conclusion: Future Directions for College- and Career-Readiness Research: Where do we go from Here? By Krista D. Mattern, Matthew N. Gaertner, & Katie Larsen McClarty List of Contributors