Kentucky Department of Education

During the Spring of 2006, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill (SB) 130, requiring all 11^th grade students take the ACT college admissions and placement examination as a part of the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) statewide high-stakes accountability assessment to determine student readiness for postsecondary education or the workplace.  The bill required inclusion of the ACT in CATS no later than the 2007-2008 school year.  The bill requires the Department to conduct periodic studies comparing the standards within the core content with ACT. If direct measures of content standards are identified on the ACT, then advice will be sought about reducing items on the state KCCT assessment.  Because CATS is the means by which Kentucky satisfies federal accountability requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act, and since NCLB requires Kentucky to assure that CATS is aligned with the state’s content standards and assesses the depth and breadth of those standards, a study is necessary to 1) determine the alignment of the ACT standards with the standards contained in the CCA 4.1; 2) identify the areas where ACT assessment items both do and do not provide necessary coverage of the CCA 4.1, including elements of breadth and depth of coverage; and 3) identify the standards in the CCA 4.1 that the ACT can be counted on to assess consistently, across forms and years.

 

The purpose of the study is threefold: 

a)      To provide information about the level and extent of alignment between the CCA 4.1 standards in the areas of reading, writing, mathematics, and science and the concepts and content (College Readiness Standards) measured by the ACT, and

b)      To identify which of the assessment items in each specified content area of the ACT assess each of the specific content standards of Kentucky’s CCA 4.1, including the level of depth (DOK) and breadth of content coverage the item provides, and

c)      To identify the standards in the CCA 4.1 that the ACT can be counted on to assess consistently for every student taking the ACT, across forms and years.      

 

Alignment Analysis of Reading and Writing Standards to ACT College Readiness Standards and ACT English and Reading Assessments  Kentucky
Appendix A  Kentucky Grade 10 Reading and High School Writing Standards and Group Consensus Depth-of-Knowledge Values
Alignment Analysis of Mathematics Standards to ACT Mathematics College Readiness Standards and ACT-Mathematics and ACT-Science Assessments  Kentucky High School
Appendix A  Kentucky Mathematics High School Standards and Group Consensus DOK Values
Alignment Analysis of Science Standards to ACT College Readiness Standards-Science and ACT-Science Assessments  Kentucky
Appendix A  Kentucky Science High School Standards and Group Consensus DOK Values