The Council for Aid to Education (CAE) is about to undertake a project funded by the Gates Foundation. (The CAE sponsors the Collegiate Learning Assessment.)
Jeff Steedles is the principal investigator for the project. The topic is at the heart of discussions of common core standards and college readiness.
This project will provide opportunities for a few consultants who are advanced enough technically to contribute to this construct validity project and would benefit from working with senior measurement scientists such as Steve Klein, formerly at the RAND corporation, and Rich Shavelson, professor emeritus, Stanford University. CAE is a non profit focused on exploring the assessment opportunities presented by performance assessment. Several hundred colleges and universities are currently testing with the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) in the United States and CAE is now developing an international version of the CLA for AHELO (the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes) project recently initiated by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
For more information on this project please contact Jeff Steedles at jsteedles@cae.org.
Description of Project for Which Consultants are Sought.
One of the primary goals of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative is to improve upon current content standards by increasing the focus on core competencies that are expected of high school graduates when they enter college. These include essential skills related to literacy and numeracy as well as general, higher-order skills like thinking critically and communicating ideas effectively. According to Kati Haycock (2010), the Common Core movement is about "trying to clarify what successful college students actually need to know and be able to do, so that we can get serious about teaching and measuring those things rather than simply calculating course credits or pass rates on low-level state tests" (p. 15).
The research project proposed here is one component of a larger effort that seeks to validate the alignment of the CCSS with college readiness. As part of this project, an assessment of the "core of the Core" (i.e., those CCSS most closely aligned with college readiness) will be developed and administered to high school seniors. Scores from this assessment will be evaluated as predictors of traditional college readiness indicators (e.g., HSGPA plus SAT or ACT scores) and compared to scores from tests aligned to existing state content standards. Moreover, the assessment developed for this project will serve as a proving ground for innovative test items aligned with CCSS that may be employed in the large-scale, multi-state assessment systems proposed for the U.S. Department of Education Race-to-the-Top Assessment Grants.
