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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/26784 |
| Date | 07 December 2011 |
| Creators | Schultz, Deanna D. |
| Contributors | Stern, Sam |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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