PowerPoint Presentation

Promise Pathways: 2012-2013 CohortBoard of Trustees RetreatJuly 24, 2012

The Utility of High School Achievement Data for Placementin Foundational Skills Courses

John HettsMark TaylorAndrew FuenmayorKaren RothsteinLong Beach City College

Daniel LamoreeMt. San Antonio College

RP Group Annual Conference, April 1, 20131College Advancement, College Advancement, Public Affairs and Governmental Relations

Educational Research Assessment Analyst1Five goalsInitiate reflection on student transition to college, assessment, & placement.Describe our research.Introduce its implementation: F2012 LBCC Promise Pathways.Briefly showcase tools Andrew, Dan, and Karen have built to help you.Help collectively unlock the potential to better understand our students and improve our colleges.2Are assessment and placement aligned with performance?Are students more prepared for college than everyone thinks?

2Transition to College:Assessment and PlacementCCCs are open enrollmentRequires assessing and planning for students educational needs.Most colleges rely almost entirely on standardized assessmentEase of administrationTransparency of administrationImpartiality of administrationPre-approval33Consequences for student transition to collegeMajority of students placed into basic skillsPlacement is significant barrier to completion

Colleges first interaction with students is You are not ready for collegeCourses take first few weeks to convince students

Substantial long-term systemic changes:More, longer, slower remediation sequencesReduction of access, especially at bottom of sequences

4Very first interaction with student is to tell them theyre not ready for collegeYoure not good enoughYou dont belongYoure not really college materialAgain, and again.

Internalized by faculty, staff, administration, counselors, public

Eventually, tragically, many of the students

Placement into remediation is a significant barrier to completion

Two enormous systemic changes:More, longer, slower remediationReduction of access (offerings at bottom of sequences first to get restricted)

4Conventional Wisdom Explaining Assessment ResultsIt is a problem with todays studentsStudents are simply, vastly unprepared for collegeKids these days .

It is a problem with public educationPublic education is failing to prepare high school studentsTeachers these days

5Not my students, not my teachers.. Teachers in general, students in general, sometimes other problematic adjectives added like urban.5What If the Conventional Wisdom is Wrong?Flynn Effect substantial, long-term increase in IQ18-24 year olds with HS degree: ~90%NAEP: Scores are at or near highs in virtually every age category for every demographic groupGrowing body of research questions effectiveness of standardized assessment for placementLittle relation to college course outcomes. (e.g.,. Belfield & Crosta, 2012; Edgescombe, 2011; Scott-Clayton, 2012; Scott-Clayton & Rodriguez, 2012; Xu, forthcoming)NAGB, 2012: Highly variable cutscores, with 2-year colleges often using HIGHER cutscores than 4-year

6the National Assessment of Educational Progress from the NCES National Center for Educational StatisticsNational Assessment Governing Board

Belfield & Crosta, 2012; Edgescombe, 2011; Scott-Clayton, 2012; Xu, forthcoming)6We sought local answers to three questions:What predicts how students assess and place into developmental courses?

What predicts how students perform in those courses?

How well are placement and performance aligned?7Built with the help of Cal-PASSCalifornia Partnership for Student Success

Won 2012 Research and Planning Group for the California Community Colleges Award for Research 7Our ResearchFive longitudinal cohorts tracking more than 30,000 students built with help of Cal-PASSFocusing on 7,000 HS grads who attend LBCC directly after high schoolExamined predictive utility of wide range of high school achievement datamost notably 11th grade California Standards Test (CST) scores and high school grades

Assessment and placement into developmental skills coursesPerformance in those classes8Highly simplified presentation of unstandardized ordinal and logistic regression Lots more too it and RP has posted a lot of it

8Alignment in English* p