Concern about college and career readiness has been expressed in both the business and education arenas. Employers are calling for entry-level employees with basic academic skills and educators are being held accountable for student achievement in academic areas similar to those required by employers. In this environment, WorkKeys has emerged as a set of assessments that could respond to the needs of both employers and educators and serve as an indicator to test takers of their readiness for further education or a career. In Alaska, state policymakers selected WorkKeys for use with high school juniors in an effort to measure both college and career readiness, and statewide testing was implemented in the fall of 2010. While past studies involving WorkKeys have focused on assessment results related to workforce development, academic indicators, or demographic variables, the purpose of this study was to describe the college and career readiness perceptions of high school juniors related to the WorkKeys Reading for Information, Locating Information, and Applied Mathematics assessments. A survey administered to 178 urban high school juniors at the time they received their WorkKeys results gathered student perceptions of the WorkKeys assessments in general as well as perceptions of college and career readiness. The key findings of this study were that student perceptions of college and career readiness were much higher than the results of the assessments indicated, and students found value in using WorkKeys results for college and career planning. This suggested the assessment results would be useful in career development interventions with students. This was the first year of mandatory WorkKeys assessments in the state and further study is recommended to gather rural student perceptions, further explore factors that students believe make the assessments useful, and determine the influence of the assessments and related interventions on academic self-efficacy. / Graduation date: 2012

The problem of this study was to investigate the Adlerian concept of social interest in a peer counseling training program. The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether or not social interest of high school juniors and seniors could be impacted by a peer counseling training program.