What Reading and Writing Skills Should College-Bound Students Have? High School and College Teachers Disagree
April 12, 2000
| Editor's Summary: More than 6,500 high school and college teachers responding to an ACT, Inc., survey of their curriculums have indicated that the two groups differ about what students need to know to be prepared for college. ACT periodically conducts extensive studies like this to reaffirm the curriculum on which the ACT college-entrance and placement exams are based. This latest study reveals that, to better prepare students for college, the nation needs more dialogue between high school and college educators. Complete results can be found in the report Content Validity Evidence in Support of ACT's Educational Achievement Tests. You may download an excerpt from the report (PDF; 23 pages, 183KB; for downloading assistance, see these tips.) Please call 319/337-1041 to obtain the complete bound report. |
IOWA CITY, Iowa—High school teachers think it's most important that students know how to organize their ideas in writing, while teachers of college freshmen, on the other hand, want students entering their classes to know basic grammar.
These are just two findings from a study conducted by ACT, Inc., the nation's largest provider of tests for students making the transition to postsecondary education.
ACT periodically surveys teachers at middle schools, junior highs, high schools and colleges across the country to determine the curriculum on which the ACT tests are based.
For secondary teachers, organizational skills ranked first relative to five other groups of writing skills—strategy, sentence structure, style, punctuation, and grammar and usage. Grammar and usage skills came in last. Those skills finished at the top, however, among postsecondary teachers.
"These findings suggest that high school and college teachers have different expectations of their students," said Cynthia B. Schmeiser, ACT vice president for test development. "Educators obviously need to communicate their differences to one another if we're to help college-bound students cross the 'preparation gap.' If high schools are stressing certain skills in their instruction, and colleges are expecting entering students to perform other skills more competently, then many students are encountering this gap."
Asked to rate specific skills in organization on a five-point scale from "not important" to "very important," 74 percent of high school teachers, but only 40 percent of college teachers, gave the highest rating to "establishing logical order." Similarly, 61 percent of the first group and only 14 percent of the latter gave the top rating to "knowing how to choose the appropriate transition word or phrase."
"Secondary teachers tended to give higher ratings than postsecondary teachers did to all language skills," Schmeiser said. "They may feel pressured to cover a very broad range because they don't know for sure what the colleges expect. The college teachers appear to want their students to arrive knowing basic punctuation and grammar so they don't have to re-teach those skills."
Secondary and postsecondary teachers also rated various aspects of reading differently. Asked about the relative importance of four types of texts—prose fiction, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences—87 percent of high school teachers, but only 25 percent of college teachers, gave fiction a rating of 5.
The area of reading content that more college teachers think "very important" for entering freshmen is the social sciences, which 36 percent rated as a 5. Only 21 percent of high school teachers rated social sciences equally high.
In regard to specific reading skills, teachers at both levels stressed that students should be able to infer the main ideas and draw conclusions from what they read, but the two groups gave very different ratings of importance to skills like predicting outcomes and identifying literal and figurative meanings. Among high school teachers, 58 percent chose "predicting outcomes" as a "very important" skill, while only 17 percent of college teachers did. Similarly, 67 percent of high school teachers, as compared to 26 percent of college teachers, thought it "very important" that students be able to identify both literal and figurative meanings in what they read.
"We conduct these surveys to insure that our tests continue to measure what is taught in high schools that is also important for success in the first year of college," Schmeiser said. "Since the ACT Assessment program is used to help students make the transition from high school to college, it's essential that it reflect both what's taught in high school as well as what colleges expect of entering students. Perhaps this study can also help schools and colleges increase their communication to reduce the preparation gap."
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| High School and College Teachers' Ratings* of Two Writing Skills |
| High School and College Teachers' Ratings* of Selected Reading Content and Skills |
| Reading Content/Skill | Percent of Group Choosing Each Rating | Mean Rating | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | ||
| Reading Content | ||||||
| Prose fiction | ||||||
| High school teachers | 87% | 8% | 4% | 0.5% | 0.5% | 4.8 |
| College teachers | 25% | 17% | 37% | 13% | 8% | 3.4 |
| Humanities | ||||||
| High school teachers | 34% | 20% | 29% | 9% | 8% | 3.6 |
| College teachers | 22% | 25% | 32% | 15% | 5% | 3.4 |
| Social sciences | ||||||
| High school teachers | 21% | 19% | 32% | 14% | 14% | 3.2 |
| College teachers | 36% | 16% | 30% | 12% | 7% | 3.6 |
| Natural sciences | ||||||
| High school teachers | 13% | 8% | 22% | 18% | 39% | 2.4 |
| College teachers | 4% | 8% | 25% | 33% | 31% | 2.2 |
| Reading Skills | ||||||
| Inferring main ideas | ||||||
| High school teachers | 84% | 13% | 3% | 0% | 0.5% | 4.8 |
| College teachers | 74% | 18% | 6% | 1% | 1% | 4.6 |
| Drawing conclusions | ||||||
| High school teachers | 84% | 14% | 1% | 0.5% | 0% | 4.8 |
| College teachers | 57% | 32% | 9% | 2% | 0% | 4.4 |
| Predicting outcomes | ||||||
| High school teachers | 58% | 25% | 13% | 2% | 1% | 4.4 |
| College teachers | 17% | 27% | 35% | 14% | 8% | 3.3 |
| Identifying literal & figurative meanings | ||||||
| High school teachers | 67% | 22% | 10% | 1% | 0.5% | 4.5 |
| College teachers | 26% | 28% | 35% | 8% | 3% | 3.7 |
| * Scale: 5 = very important, 3 = moderately important, 1 = not important |
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