Evidence-based Practices for Teaching About Planetary Health and Environmental Challenges
Category: Teacher Preparation and Professional Learning
Growing efforts to ensure that students graduate high school both college- and career-ready raise a need for better understanding and measures of “career readiness.” We leverage data from one state (North Carolina) where nearly half of students take a college entrance exam (the ACT) in 11th grade and a career readiness exam (the WorkKeys) in 12th grade to examine how these different measures of students’ skills relate to each other and to postsecondary outcomes. We find, first, that student performance on the ACT and WorkKeys is highly correlated, with most students either earning both a college-ready ACT score and a career-ready WorkKeys score, or neither a college- nor career-ready score. Second, student performance on math exam domains associates more strongly with postsecondary outcomes than performance on other domains, with ACT Math being more predictive of college completion and WorkKeys Applied Math more predictive of early-career earnings. Third, net of test scores, students’ GPAs are strong predictors of both college and early-career outcomes. Results provide suggestive evidence about skills that may be key to success across college and career pathways and highlight that more work remains needed to develop better understandings of career readiness as distinct from college readiness.
Keywords
High schools; education policy; standardized testing; career readiness
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/q9yp-x778
