ACT Newsroom & Blog

As part of ACT’s mission to help people achieve education success and ensure that accessible and equitable opportunities are available to all students, we offer language supports for English learners – students whose first or most fluent language is not English. Research shows that these supports can help reduce students’ language barriers and allow them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills more accurately. However, these supports will only benefit test-takers who use them.

Community colleges exist to make a higher education that would be unattainable for many students accessible to all students, simultaneously driving socioeconomic mobility and economic, workforce, and community development for the regions they serve. How has the pandemic affected the way institutions consider or approach this mission?

The pandemic was, in many ways, a catalyst for change. But, before I talk about that, I want to be sure to note what did not change – and that is the commitment to the mission of access. Community colleges remained ardently committed to providing access to education opportunities during the pandemic and in its aftermath.

What was astounding to witness in real time was the pivot to an array of learning modalities that would provide minimal disruptions for students. All hands on deck were required to ensure that curriculum, technology, and human resources were in place. For our thousands of career and technical education programs – many of which are high-tech or high-touch – it required extraordinary levels of coordination within the college and the community to ensure that critical workforce pipelines remained viable while students and faculty remained safe. Health care programs are a prime example, but community colleges also provide education for infrastructure jobs such as electrical linemen, supply chain logistics, commercial drivers, and many others. Community colleges found ways to continue these classes – through online education, simulators, and artificial intelligence, to name a few examples – to ensure that the local workforce pipeline remained as solvent as possible.

Amid a strong job market, degree inflation, and more competition from regional public and for-profit universities, fewer students are choosing community college. How are these shifting enrollment patterns affecting your colleges, and what are the implications for our country and communities?

The data shows that community college enrollments have fallen, and the implications are top of mind for leaders across the sector.

While it is impossible to pinpoint any one reason for the decline, we know that for many students, community colleges are the on-ramp to economic mobility and the middle class. We know that students of color have been disproportionately affected, which means that we will continue to see the gaps widen among Black and brown students and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. As we look at the shifting population, the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” will only get worse.

We all know that an educated citizenry is better for the community. Education means higher earning potential and fewer social services needed. However, many of our colleges are funded on a per-student basis, so lower enrollment means lower funding and fewer services to help students complete a pathway through higher education.

As we continue to see the effects of the pandemic play out, we know there are other troubling patterns, as well. For example, the share of two-year students who successfully go on to get a bachelor’s degree has shrunk almost 15% since the pandemic began in 2020. How can community colleges and their collaborators ensure that students who still want to pursue a two- or four-year degree have the supports to successfully do so?

We are working toward finding and creating ways in which to smooth the transfer process for our students.

We know that community college students fare very well upon transferring and we need to ensure that they are able to do so. Particularly in rural areas, we are working to establish partnerships between the community colleges and universities to create seamless transfer pathways and to then replicate and scale them across the country.

Community colleges are known for serving the students with the fewest resources and the greatest obstacles, with less funding than their four-year counterparts. What are the unique challenges your students are facing, and how are institutions working to better recognize and address them?

Community colleges do far more than provide education. In many cases, they address basic human needs. They provide food, housing, transportation, medical care, and so much more. Students can’t focus on education if they are hungry or can’t get to campus.

Serving those without access to broadband internet or computers is also something community colleges do. Our colleges have worked tirelessly to address these issues – working with funders and providers to ensure that students have access to laptops and the internet.

Community colleges work to serve the whole student and not just provide higher education – we focus on removing barriers to success.

Half of all Hispanic and 40% of all Black students in higher education are enrolled at community colleges. Community colleges were designed for equity from their very beginning, but how is that purpose coming to the forefront amid the trends we’re discussing?

Equity is a core tenant of the community college mission. In fact, equity and accessibility are the foundation of community college.

Recently, AACC looked at the equity measures and the student success initiatives that were underway and found that we had to focus equally on success for all students. For us, it is a moral imperative that success be truly achievable for all students. And, while that is a great soundbite, it is a daunting challenge on campus. At community colleges across the country, leaders are looking at their outcomes and resources and determining how to better serve students in obtaining their goals. They are implementing programs and services, observing outcomes, and using strategies to improve. They are doing so in spite of funding shortfalls, politics, and other barriers.

We hear and amplify these strategies across the country so that colleges can use known models and adapt them to fill their attainment gaps. The work is far from done, but I am incredibly proud of the strides that our colleges are taking to ensure that every student has the opportunity to find success.

Dr. Walter G. Bumphus is president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). He previously served as a professor in the Community College Leadership Program and as chair of the Department of Educational Administration at The University of Texas at Austin, holding the A. M. Aikin Regents Endowed Chair in Junior and Community College Education Leadership.

ACT is committed to helping all students achieve education and workplace success, including the more than 7 million students in the U.S. who have disabilities. For these students, ACT provides testing accommodations, which are changes to test administration conditions that allow students to more accurately demonstrate their knowledge and skills. ACT continuously evaluates the accommodations that we offer, as well as the processes by which students request and are approved for accommodations. We also monitor the validity and efficacy of the accommodations and the scores that result from test administrations that include accommodations. ACT strives to provide a fair and equitable assessment experience to every student.

To this end, we recently published a repository of ACT research investigating the performance and experiences of students testing with accommodations, including two new studies. ACT will add to this repository as our researchers continue to examine this important topic, as well as others affecting students with disabilities.

One of the most important findings of our new research mentioned above is that students with disabilities want to go to college at similar rates as their peers, with 46% wanting to earn a bachelor’s degree, 16% wanting to attend one to two years of graduate study, and 14% wanting to earn a doctorate or professional degree.

However, we are seeing some potential opportunity barriers for these students. Students who tested with accommodations were less likely to take core academic coursework in math and science and tended to have lower ACT scores and lower high school GPAs than students testing without accommodations. Previous research has shown that taking a core academic curriculum of four years of English and three years each of math, social studies, and science is related to both higher ACT scores and higher GPAs.

We also found that ACT scores and high school GPAs vary widely by disability type. For example, students with intellectual disorders or learning disabilities tended to have lower ACT scores and GPAs, while students with anxiety or depression tended to have higher ACT scores and GPAs.

Another recent study looked at score gains for students taking the ACT twice, either with or without accommodations on one or both tests. We found that students who first tested without accommodations and then retested with accommodations had lower scores on their first test, but higher score gains than their peers, which we would expect to see if the accommodations are helping them more accurately demonstrate their knowledge and skills.

However, we also found that a substantial number of students initially tested with accommodations but retested without accommodations. This raises a concern that students may be encountering difficulties in obtaining accommodations, and additional research is needed to find out whether students chose to retest without accommodations or if they faced barriers at some point during the request process.

In 2021, ACT updated its accommodations policy to streamline eligibility requirements and make it easier for students, families, and educators to provide the documentation they need to receive accommodations. We have been tracking the effects of this policy change and have seen:

• An increase in examinees testing with accommodations, from 4% to 6%.
• An increase in the automatic approval rate, from 45% to 90%.
• A decrease in non-approved or partially approved requests.
• Faster approvals, fewer customer calls, and positive customer feedback.
• Less time spent by our accommodations team members on approving accommodations, so they can focus on other initiatives to better serve students.

Students say the work that ACT is doing to remove barriers and make testing more accessible is making a real difference in their lives. Last year, Ky’Ren Johnson, then a junior at Louisiana’s Bastrop High School, became the first student to take the ACT using an accommodation called JAWS, a text-to-speech software. ACT is continuing to explore how we can use technology to improve test accessibility for students with disabilities.

These developments underscore ACT’s commitment to eliminating barriers and ensuring that all students have access to the resources and supports they need to be successful in education and in life.

 

By: Dana Murano and Nola Daley, research scientists; and Jeremy Burrus, senior director, ACT's Center for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning

Today is the fourth annual International SEL Day. Once a year, the field celebrates social and emotional learning (SEL) and recognizes its value to students, schools, and communities. Today, we join in this celebration by sharing some of the lessons learned from ACT’s recent research on social and emotional learning: that students and caregivers overwhelmingly think social and emotional skills are important for success in school, how these skills predict college enrollment, and more.

What Skills Do Students and Caregivers Think Are Most Important for Success in School?

Social and emotional skills are interpersonal, self-regulatory, and task-related behaviors that are important for adaption to and successful performance in education and workplace settings. While there is a great deal of evidence showing social and emotional learning’s association with success in school, we wanted to hear from high school students and families themselves about their own perspectives on social and emotional skills. To do this, we asked them to list the five skills they thought were most important for student success. We asked this question at the very beginning of a survey, in an open-ended format, before making any mention of social and emotional learning, so as not to influence the responses.

The results were striking: 89% of students and 77% of caregivers included at least one social and emotional skill – such as work ethic, time management, or communication – in their response.

We also organized all responses into broad categories based on ACT’s Holistic Framework for education and workforce readiness, including core academic skills, cross-cutting capabilities, education and career navigation factors, and social and emotional skills. Both students and caregivers listed skills that fell into the social and emotional skills category more than any other skill category. Half of all skills that students listed were SE skills, and 36% of all skills listed by caregivers were social and emotional skills.

We then looked at how often individual skills were listed. As shown in the table below, many of the most frequently listed skills were social and emotional skills, which are bolded with an asterisk.

 

March is Women’s History Month, and today is International Women’s Day, a global opportunity to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. We are pleased to be able to share the following guest post from Deann Cook, president and CEO of the Iowa Women’s Foundation (IWF). As a nonprofit organization based in Iowa City, ACT has been a supporter of IWF for many years through charitable donations, awards programs, and research projects. We asked Deann for her perspective on recent promising discussions, developments, or trends in education and training that she hopes will improve the lives of women and girls in Iowa and nationwide in the years ahead, as well as how policymakers, advocates, and other education and workforce stakeholders can best help empower women and girls when it comes to education and training.