college-readiness

Report explores college, career readiness strategies


A white paper from Pearson is designed to help educators navigate different approaches to students’ college and career readiness

college-readinessA new white paper introduces three “readiness models” designed to gauge students’ preparedness for college and workforce success.

On Track: Redefining Readiness in Education and the Workplace,” from Pearson, was written by David T. Conley, Ph.D., Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., and researchers from the Pearson Research & Innovation Network Center for College & Career Success.

Over the years, the authors assert, educators, employers, and policy makers have changed their expectations. Instead of wanting to assess students’ current knowledge, these stakeholders want to know more about students’ potential to achieve impactful and successful outcomes in the real world.

This has led to evolving student assessment systems, as well as new definitions around what readiness means.

The white paper presents three readiness models, providing the foundations of each model and comparing and contrasting their structures and objectives.

Next page: Three readiness models in the report

The College Readiness Index for middle school students was created to address gaps in research and practice and to provide students, parents, and teachers earlier, more actionable readiness diagnoses across a diversity of academic and non-academic domains. Six middle school factors are included in the college readiness index: academic achievement, motivation, behavior, social engagement, family circumstances, and school characteristics.

The Conley Readiness Index was developed to assess entering college students’ strengths in four key components of postsecondary success, and pinpoint specific areas in need of improvement.

“First-time college students quickly come to grips with the gaps between their perceived competence and the reality of their performance in a postsecondary environment. These gaps often result from the lack of good readiness information. They need information to help them understand how ready they are to succeed and where they need to improve,” said Conley, developer of the index.

GRIT aims to help students, faculty, staff, businesses, leaders, and employees assess their capacity to leverage personal strengths (for example, robustness and resilience), grow and optimize their skill set and ultimately thrive on adversity, in order to measurably improve personal and collective outcomes.

“Through numerous studies over the years, the concept of GRIT has evolved significantly. Not only can GRIT be assessed and measured, but it can also be developed and is predictive of a multitude of factors including goal completion rate and employment status,” said Stoltz, who developed the GRIT model.

The white paper will be discussed during a poster session at Pearson’s Employability Summit at the 2016 SXSWedu Conference on March 9 in Austin, Texas.

Material from a press release was used in this report.

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Laura Ascione

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