Faculty Perspectives on Using High School Data in an Era of Placement Testing Reform

Objective: Community colleges across the country are making dramatic shifts away from traditional reliance on placement testing for developmental education and toward using high school measures to assess college-readiness. Yet the views of faculty dealing with these changes, including their perspectives on the quality and usefulness of high school data, are not well-understood. We explore faculty views of high school transcript and placement testing data, attributions made with the data, and beliefs about the extent to which these data are useful for instruction. Methods: We conducted a survey and semi-structured interviews with math faculty in one community college math department ( n = 21). We used real high school records to develop a Personalized Student Profile of student math backgrounds to engage faculty in sensemaking about high school and placement testing data. Results: Faculty did not appear to readily trust high school data, tending only to do so when it fit their existing understandings of student ability as measured by placement tests. Although faculty described opportunities to use the data to inform instruction, they noted the challenges of actually doing so. Conclusions: The findings reveal significant faculty concerns about high school measures and point toward shifts in faculty attitudes and beliefs that may need to be addressed in order for reforms that upend traditional approaches to remediation and instruction to be successful. We discuss critical future research directions for this new paradigm of developmental education in community colleges.

Placement testing: One test, two tests, three tests? How many tests are sufficient?

Accurate placement within levels of an ESL program is crucial for optimal teaching and learning. Commercially available tests are commonly used for placement, but their effectiveness has been found to vary. This study uses data from the Ohio Program of Intensive English (OPIE) at Ohio University to examine the value of two commercially available tests (the TOEFL ITP and the Michigan EPT) and a locally developed writing test for accurate placement decisions. Placement accuracy was measured in terms of the relationship between test scores and (1) appropriate placement levels for individual students according to their teachers, and (2) student performance in the classes. Findings support the continued use of multiple measures for more accurate placement decisions in the study context. However, the relationship between test scores and student performance, measured by students’ grades in the actual course levels and their success in advancing to a higher course level as additional indicators of the extent to which placement tests provide an accurate indication, was weak when analyzed through multiple regression and cross-tabulation, suggesting that factors other than initial proficiency are primarily determinative of student success when students have been accurately placed.