TEXAS Adult & Family Literacy QUARTERLY

Professional Wisdom for Adult and Family Literacy

Professional Wisdom and GED Completer College-Readiness

by Dr. David Joost

As the demand for a more educated workforce escalates, completers of the General Education Development (GED) examinations increasingly access higher education and postsecondary training opportunities through community colleges. Like other nontraditional students, GED completers often do not have the academic skills necessary to successfully persist and complete either a college degree or an occupational certificate. While GED completers clearly have the expectation, and professional wisdom suggests, that their credential can prepare them for college entry, a review of the literature reveals no research-based studies that discuss whether or not the current version of the GED can be used for determining college-readiness.

The purpose of the GED, according to the GED Testing Service, is to measure the major academic skills and knowledge associated with a high school program of study. When preparing students who wish to attend college, teachers of adult education classes across Texas and elsewhere, lack empirical data upon which to base their practice and resultantly must lean exclusively on professional wisdom. They have little choice but to base their practice on the belief that since the GED credential is roughly equivalent to a high school diploma, doing well at some level on the GED can indicate a student is prepared for college entry. To develop further insights into what college-readiness means for their students, they likely look to their own college experiences, refer to local college core curricula, and build on the past outcomes of their students who have entered and attempted to succeed in the college environment.

In Texas, college-readiness is clearly defined. Our state legislature’s Texas Success Initiative establishes certain standard assessment benchmarks that students must achieve to be considered college-ready. For instance, a student must score at least 81 out of a possible 99 on the ACT Computer-Adaptive Placement Assessment and Support System (COMPASS) Reading Placement Test to be considered college-ready in the learning domain of Reading. In Mathematics, a student must score at least 71 out of a possible score of 99 on the COMPASS Algebra Test. There are no equivalent GED scores that are accepted for college-readiness at any Texas community colleges or other postsecondary institutions.

To explore how GED scores might be predictive and to derive a sense of what GED scores might indicate college-readiness in the domains of Reading and Mathematics, a study was conducted using data from completers of the current version of the GED who were enrolled at Houston Community College in semester credit hour college classes during the 2006 calendar year. While the results of the study should be generalized only with some caution, they do add to the field’s sense of what constitutes college-readiness for GED completers. In addition, the results provide the beginnings of a base of research against which professional wisdom on the topic can be compared. The research referenced in the remainder of this article is derived from a study conducted as part of a doctoral dissertation regarding the usefulness of the current version of the GED as an indicator of college-readiness. The full study and its results can be seen at viking.coe.uh.edu/~djoost/Dissertation/Joost%20Dissertation%20FINAL.doc. This is a Microsoft® Word document.

Statistical analysis of the scores of the two tests confirm that GED scores are positively linked to COMPASS Test scores at a significant level. This means that under the study’s conditions, GED scores can meaningfully predict COMPASS scores with some measure of reliability. This finding confirms the intuition of Adult Education teachers who believe that a student’s score on the GED can be predictive of whether or not that student is ready to succeed in college. Accepting that GED scores are meaningfully linked of COMPASS scores and therefore can provide a sense of a student’s college-readiness, the next question logically becomes, “What GED scores concord to the COMPASS Tests’ college-readiness scores?”

Using an equipercentile ranking methodology, the study determined that a score of 540 on the GED Reading Test concorded to a COMPASS Reading Placement Test’s college-readiness score of 71. However, in the domain of Mathematics, the equipercentile ranking procedure determined that a nearly perfect score of 790 was required on the GED Mathematics Test for a student to be considered college-ready. In fact, some of the 91 subjects in the sample had achieved perfect GED scores of 800 and were still unable to meet the college-readiness benchmark score set for the COMPASS Algebra Placement Test.

The findings of the study confirm existing professional wisdom in one sense, being that there is a GED Reading Test score that, when achieved by a student suggests the student is adequately prepared to successfully persist in college-level course work. However, the findings in the domain of Mathematics suggest that even a perfect score of 800 on the GED may not assure a student of being college-ready. This finding suggests that if adult education curricula are to be aligned with higher education curricula, there is clearly a gap that must be considered in the domain of Mathematics. To address this gap, we again look to the professional wisdom of skilled, experienced, and trained teachers to determine how to adapt college-core mathematics curricula to meet the needs of Adult Education students who desire to enroll in college. As in the instance, just described, it is not uncommon for research to follow and confirm professional wisdom and practice, in fact for the field of education it is the rule more than it is the exception.

About the Author

Dr. David Joost is the Director of Adult Education Programs at Houston Community College, the state’s largest provider of adult education. This article draws significantly from his November 2008 dissertation, Comparing the General Education Development (GED) Tests to the ACT Computer-Adaptive Placement Assessment and Support System (COMPASS) Tests for Usefulness as Predictors for College- readiness.