The National Senior Certificate (NSC) examination in South Africa is a standardised assessment whose main function is to determine whether Grade 12 learners have mastered subject knowledge at the culmination of their secondary education. Alongside this, the National Benchmark Test Project (NBTP) was introduced to develop the National Benchmark…

Elisabeth Barnett of the Community College Research Center proposes a new dimension to the general understanding of how best to prepare high school students for higher education. She suggests considering the accumulation of momentum points--specific to college preparatory "experiences" and markers of educational "attainment" in…

This executive summary describes a paper that is part of a series intended to encourage the nation's secondary and postsecondary systems to take joint responsibility for substantially increasing the number of young people who are prepared for college and career success. In this report, author Elisabeth Barnett of the Community College Research…

In 2011, under the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI), Florida made college placement testing mandatory for 11th-grade students who had scored in the midrange of its standardized 10th-grade assessment. Those with placement test scores below college-ready were assigned in 12th grade to college readiness and success…

Postsecondary access and degree completion are increasingly important concerns for individuals and policymakers. This dissertation presents evidence on three distinct strategies for increasing students' level of preparedness for higher education, rates of postsecondary enrollment, and rates of postsecondary degree completion. The first is an…

Students' inaccurate ideas about what is represented by chemical equations and concepts underlying stoichiometry are well documented; however, there are few classroom-ready instructional solutions to help students build scientifically accurate ideas about these topics central to learning chemistry. An intervention (two inquiry-based activities)…