How Significant of a Challenge is Reading?

I discussed on the GPG blog last week how reading may be the key barrier to success in higher education for many students who are assessed at the lowest levels on placement exams.  Data shared by some of our participants in our online jam on August 4th revealed that the chances of success in developmental education and eventually higher education for students assessed at the 6th grade reading level and below are minimal at best. On the other hand, students at the 7th grade level can be successful.

The big question for me is how prevalent is placement in the lowest levels of developmental reading.  To try to answer this question I contacted ACT and The College Board for some data on the distribution of scores on the COMPASS and Accuplacer exams.

ACT was the first to respond to my inquiry so we will share their data and look forward to doing the same with the College Board on the Accuplacer.   COMPASS annually publishes the Entering Student Descriptive Report (ESDR) which describes who takes the COMPASS and how well they perform.  They show a distribution of scores for all subject areas on the COMPASS. When combined with ACT’s recommended cut scores and placement courses for students, we can get some idea of what percent of students score at the lowest levels in math, reading and writing.  Keep in mind that each state, system or institution sets their own cut scores, which may be higher or lower than ACT’s recommended scores.  However, ACT has the benefit of hundreds of thousands of student records to determine what levels students should be placed at in order to have the greatest chance of success.

Following is a table derived from the ESDR showing the performance and recommended placement of students who took the COMPASS reading assessment.  About 1.1 million students took the test in 2010 at two year institutions and about 77,000 took it at four year institutions, which gives you a sense of the number of students in each category.

The table shows that 15% of two year students and 12% of four year students who took the COMPASS reading exam would be placed at the lowest levels of reading. There was not much difference between younger and older students, although generally younger students (19 and under) scored more frequently in the lower level.  What might be more alarming is that almost half of all students who took the COMPASS reading test were assessed as having some reading deficiency.  Unfortunately we are not able to say exactly what grade levels students who score at the lowest level are at,  it is too subjective of a standard, but this data provides some idea about the extent of the problem.

What we don’t know are the circumstances under which students were assessed in reading and what happened to students after they scored at low levels.  In other words, is the assessment process conducive to students receiving the support they need or is it really a filter to discourage students from enrolling?  If students persevere and enroll in reading, is instruction done in a manner that supports success or does it reinforce a filtering effect in the system?  These are provocative questions – hopefully we will learn more as we continue our focus on students assessed at the lowest levels.