Starting in the 2019-2020 school year, NewSchools Venture Fund awarded a research grant to ACT to better understand factors related to social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL lessons were implemented in schools serving students who were 96% Latinx, 85% economically disadvantaged, and 38% English learners during the 2019-2020 school year. The…

This issue brief is part of a five-part series that reports findings from research conducted by ACT in collaboration with Region One Education Service Center. This brief focuses on the efficacy of social and emotional learning (SEL) lessons implemented and includes results from surveys completed by students who participated in an SEL lessons…

This issue brief is part of a five-part series that reports findings from research conducted by ACT in collaboration with Region One Education Service Center. This brief focuses on the efficacy of SEL lessons implemented during the 2019-2020 school year and examines their relationship to school-reported student outcomes such as grades, attendance,…

ACT recently launched the ACT Certified Educator program to assist educators with enhancing their teaching strategies, and to help students improve their academic achievement. This study summarizes participants' reactions to the program.

Formally launched in September 2018, the ACT® Certified Educator™ program is a professional learning and credentialing program designed to help educators improve their teaching and tutoring strategies and skills and be fully equipped to support student learning in the core content areas of the ACT® test. In this study, participants' views of the…

Learners from underserved backgrounds tend to show lower levels of college readiness (ACT, 2016a; ACT, 2018). In part to address these disparities, the authors investigated growth in social and emotional (SE) skills in a cohort of largely Hispanic, high-poverty students who participated in GEAR UP. GEAR UP is a discretionary federal grant program…

The Mosaic SEL Turbo Leader program is part of ACT's social and emotional (SE) learning curriculum. It is designed for middle school students and includes 17 web-based lessons covering student self-efficacy and agency, positive peer and adult relationships and conflict strategies, and growth mindset skills and tools (for more information on Turbo…

ACT, the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (NCCEP), and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance) collaborated to examine the efficacy of NCCEP's Career & College Clubs (CCC) curriculum for increasing college readiness skills in high school students participating in Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for…

This study was done in collaboration with the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (NCCEP) and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance). This report, the second in the series, Examining the Efficacy of Career & College Clubs, explores how changes in the college readiness areas of social and emotional skills,…

Scores from standardized tests are common criteria for admission to a four-year college or university, and most require, recommend, or consider test scores as part of the admissions process. To help improve their chances of college admission, many high school students turn to test-preparation programs. We used an experimental design to evaluate…

This study sought to estimate the potential benefits of using ACT® WorkKeys® Curriculum to improve foundational workplace skills and subsequent performance on the ACT® WorkKeys® Applied Math, Workplace Documents, and Graphic Literacy assessments. Students at Nevada State High School (NSHS) took the WorkKeys Assessments before and after using ACT…

ACT® Academy™ was launched in March 2018 as a free online resource to help students improve their academic skills and prepare for the ACT® test. This study provides an early look at ACT Academy usage and its effects on ACT test scores. The authors found that moderate usage (e.g., 6 hours) of ACT Academy's quizzes and practice tests leads to an…

As part of ACT's Holistic Framework, ACT researchers developed a Behavioral Skills Framework that can be used to assess behavior in education and work settings. By utilizing specific statements of effective behaviors, known as performance level descriptors (PLDs) (e.g., communicating well in group tasks), the Behavioral Skills Framework is…

Three mode comparability studies were conducted on the following Saturday national ACT test dates: October 26, 2019, December 14, 2019, and February 8, 2020. The primary goal of these studies was to evaluate whether ACT scores exhibited mode effects between paper and online testing that would necessitate statistical adjustments to the online…

We assessed the relationship of level of QualityCore[R] implementation and student achievement in Algebra I. The study is based on 1,291 9th grade students in three large metropolitan school districts who took EXPLORE in the fall and the QualityCore Algebra I end-of-course assessment (EOC) in the spring. During the same period, the students' 41…