Estimating Student Performance on the Common Core Standards

The Common Core State Standards has caused quite a stir. This effort to build a set of academic standards for the nation – led by the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and endorsed by the Obama Administration – has many stakeholders wondering how students will stack up according to the new benchmarks. Now a recent report released by ACT, called A First Look at the Common Core and College and Career Readiness, seeks to estimate how today’s students are likely to perform on assessments of the Common Core Standards. The results show that states, school districts, schools, and students have a fair amount of catching up to do.

Essentially, ACT lined up clusters of test items on the most recent ACT college entrance exam with aspects of the Common Core Standards, approximating how 11^th graders would perform on each of those components of the Common Core College Readiness benchmarks based on how they performed on the ACT. They used this information to estimate 11^th grade performance in English, reading, and math on the Common Core. While this method is far from perfect – the ACT test items cannot perfectly reflect each aspect of the Common Core’s benchmarks – it provides a decent sense of how American students will perform under the new standards and the degree to which current state standards may or may not line up with the Common Core.

Importantly, ACT did this analysis for two groups of testers – the total population of 11^th grade students that took the ACT, and the population of 11^th grade students that took the ACT as part of their state’s assessment test. In other words, they analyzed a population that mostly self-selected into taking the ACT and a population that did not select to take the test, but were compelled to do so by the state. Students that select to take a test are typically more motivated to do well than students that are obligated to take a test. As a result, examining the population of students that were compelled to take the ACT provides a better approximation of performance on other state-compelled achievement tests than the total population of students.[1]

Unsurprisingly, the percent of students scoring as college-ready or above was higher among the total population of 11^th graders than the population of 11^th graders that were compelled to take the test – 66 percent versus 56 percent in English, 52 percent versus 40 percent in reading, and 43 versus 34 percent in math. Not surprisingly this shows us that students that were compelled to take the test do not score as well as students that chose to take the test, as a result of motivation, preparedness, and/or ability.

But more importantly, the results indicate that many students across the nation – regardless of their motivation – are not college-ready, particularly in math. This means that states, school districts, and schools will likely have to make significant changes to their curricula and instruction to ensure that they better align with the Common Core Standards in the future. This will be a tall order for many states and districts, particularly given current budget troubles.

Check back with Ed Money Watch for more updates on the Common Core Standards as states begin to implement them.