A First Look at the Common Core and College and Career Readiness

ACT's first-of-its-kind research report, entitled A First Look at the Common Core and College and Career Readiness, provides an estimate of current student performance on the Common Core State Standards, using ACT college- and career-readiness data.

The report offers both instructional and curricular support recommendations, as well as policy considerations for state and federal policymakers that can support teaching and learning of the Common Core.

A First Look at Common Core ELA & Literacy:

Too few students are able to understand complex text. Relative to the
Common Core, only 31% of students are performing at a college- and career-ready
level with respect to successfully understanding complex text. The
Common Core State Standards define a “staircase” of increasing text complexity
designed to move all students to college- and career-ready levels of reading by
no later than the end of high school.

Increased focus is needed on some key aspects of language. Two areas of
emphasis in the Common Core State Standards for Language are (1) students’
knowledge of language varieties and ability to use language skillfully and
(2) students’ ability to acquire and use a rich vocabulary. Relative to the Common
Core, only 35% of students are performing at college- and career-ready levels
with respect to these skills.

ACT Recommendations:

• Students should master the grade-specific standards for Common Core
Language Standard 3, which, beginning formally in grade 2 and building
throughout the grades, focuses on such areas as recognizing differences
between formal and informal English and between spoken and written
English, using language precisely and concisely, and maintaining
consistency in style and tone.
• Students would also benefit from greater and more systematic attention to
vocabulary development. This can include direct vocabulary instruction and
a steadily increasing emphasis on helping students acquire vocabulary
through reading. Particularly important is that students gain what the Standards
refer to as general academic vocabulary: words and phrases that are often
encountered in written texts in a variety of subjects but that are rarely heard in
spoken language.
Content-area reading needs strengthening. Students struggle when reading
texts in content areas, especially in science, where only 24% of students are able
to work with science materials at a level that would make them college and
career ready. To help all students achieve sufficient literacy skills in history/social
studies and in science and technical subjects, as well as in English language
arts, states must ensure that teachers in these subject areas use their
unique content knowledge to foster students’ ability to read, write, and
communicate in the various disciplines.
• Specifically, English language arts teachers in middle and upper grades
should incorporate a particular type of informational text—literary
nonfiction—into the traditional curriculum of stories, dramas, and poems.
• Teachers in other subject areas should use their own subject-area expertise
to help students learn to read, write, and communicate effectively in their
specific field.
• The Common Core State Standards in reading are explicitly modeled on the
idea of shared responsibility for students’ literacy development. States and
districts should therefore prepare middle and high school content-area
teachers for this role by providing professional development opportunities
that build the reading instruction capacity of content-area specialists.

A First Look at Common Core Mathematics

Increased focus is needed on the foundations of mathematics. The low
performance by students on Number & Quantity (34%) in the Common Core is
of particular concern because these skills are the foundation for success in the
other Common Core mathematics conceptual categories (e.g., Algebra,
Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics & Probability).

ACT Recommendations:

• In the early grades, students will benefit from problem solving in novel contexts
and hands-on experiences with increasingly sophisticated quantities and their
measurement.
• In middle school and high school, teachers should lead students to see
connections between Number & Quantity and other Common Core
mathematics conceptual categories, particularly Algebra.
Math interventions are needed for students who are falling behind at the
earliest grades. Across the board, Hispanic and African American students
performed well below their Caucasian counterparts in all Common Core math
domains. States must ensure that teachers and students have the resources
necessary to identify struggling math students as early as possible (K–4)
so that proper interventions are made. Providing teachers and students with
adequate opportunities to collect achievement data that function diagnostically—
data collected frequently and from both formative and summative
assessments—is crucial to supporting students’ learning progressions and for
optimal growth to occur.
Greater understanding of mathematical processes and practices is needed.
For each of the Common Core Mathematical Practices standards, only about
one-third of students reached the college- and career-ready level. States and
districts must ensure that conceptual understanding is emphasized for all
students in mathematics. More specifically, students at all grade levels need
to be:
• working and solving challenging nonroutine problems;
• explaining methods and justifying conclusions;
• predicting and conjecturing about things like unknown numbers,
measurements, quantitative relations, the behavior of functions, how well a
model fits reality, the effectiveness of different solution methods, and the way
probabilistic events occur; and
• looking for patterns and structure in places like diagrams, equations, number
systems, proofs, problems, tables, graphs, and real-world objects.