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Promise Pathways: 2012-2013 Cohort Board of Trustees Retreat July 24, 2012 The Utility of High School Achievement Data for Placement in Foundational Skills Courses John Hetts Mark Taylor Andrew Fuenmayor Karen Rothstein Long Beach City College Daniel Lamoree Mt. San Antonio College RP Group Annual Conference, April 1, 2013 1

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Five goals 1.Initiate reflection on student transition to college, assessment, & placement. 2.Describe our research. 3.Introduce its implementation: F2012 LBCC Promise Pathways. 4.Briefly showcase tools Andrew, Dan, and Karen have built to help you. 5.Help collectively unlock the potential to better understand our students and improve our colleges. 2

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Transition to College: Assessment and Placement CCCs are open enrollment Requires assessing and planning for students educational needs. Most colleges rely almost entirely on standardized assessment Ease of administration Transparency of administration Impartiality of administration Pre-approval 3

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Consequences for student transition to college Majority of students placed into basic skills Placement is significant barrier to completion Colleges first interaction with students is You are not ready for college Courses take first few weeks to convince students Substantial long-term systemic changes: More, longer, slower remediation sequences Reduction of access, especially at bottom of sequences 4

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Conventional Wisdom Explaining Assessment Results It is a problem with todays students Students are simply, vastly unprepared for college Kids these days . It is a problem with public education Public education is failing to prepare high school students Teachers these days 5

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What If the Conventional Wisdom is Wrong? Flynn Effect substantial, long-term increase in IQ 18-24 year olds with HS degree: ~90% NAEP: Scores are at or near highs in virtually every age category for every demographic group Growing body of research questions effectiveness of standardized assessment for placement Little 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 6

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We 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? 7

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Our Research Five longitudinal cohorts tracking more than 30,000 students built with help of Cal-PASS Focusing on 7,000 HS grads who attend LBCC directly after high school Examined predictive utility of wide range of high school achievement data most notably 11th grade California Standards Test ( CST ) scores and high school grades Assessment and placement into developmental skills courses Performance in those classes 8

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Alignment in English * p