Reading Between the Lines:

What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading

Executive Summary

Based on 2005 ACT-tested high school graduates, it appears that only about half of our nation’s ACT-tested high school students are ready for college-level reading. What’s worse, more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and tenth grade than are actually ready by the time they reach twelfth grade.

College readiness—the level of preparation students need in order to be ready to enroll and succeed without remediation in credit-bearing entry- level coursework at a two- or four-year institution, trade school, or technical school—is currently inadequate and should be an expectation for all high school students.

It is also recognized today that the knowledge and skills needed for college are equivalent to those needed in the workplace (American Diploma Project, 2004; Barth, 2003). We and others have documented that improving college and workforce readiness is critical to developing a diverse and talented labor force that will help ensure our nation’s economic competitiveness in a growing global economy (Callan & Finney, 2003; Cohen, 2002; Somerville & Yi, 2002).

Reading is an essential component of college and workplace readiness. Low literacy levels often prevent students from mastering other subjects (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2002). Poor readers struggle to learn in text-heavy courses and are frequently blocked from taking academically more challenging courses (Au, 2000).

Much has been written about the literacy problem in U.S. high schools. Approximately six million of the nation’s secondary school students are reading well below grade level (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2002, 2003). More than 3,000 students drop out of high school every day (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2003), and one of the most commonly cited reasons for the dropout rate is that students do not have the literacy skills to keep up with the curriculum (Kamil, 2003; Snow & Biancarosa, 2003).

Students at the college level are not faring much better. Eleven percent of entering postsecondary school students are enrolled in remedial reading coursework (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Seventy percent of students who took one or more remedial reading courses do not attain a college degree or certificate within eight years of enrollment (Adelman, 2004).

According to Greene (2000), the shortage of basic literacy skills costs U.S. businesses, universities, and underprepared high school graduates as much as $16 billion per year in decreased productivity and remedial costs.

®ACT data suggest that the nation’s high school students are not ready for college-level reading. But ACT data also show that, while it is important for students to be able to comprehend both explicit and implicit material in texts, as well as to understand how various textual elements (such as main ideas, relationships, or generalizations) function in a text, the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are college ready and students who are not is the ability to comprehend complex texts. These results are summarized below and are followed by recommended action steps that policymakers and educators can take to help all students read at the level of proficiency necessary to ensure that they are ready to succeed in college without remediation.

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