{"id":3053,"date":"2014-06-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/what-students-need-to-know-and-be-able-to-do-in-k12-and-higher-education\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T12:52:32","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:52:32","slug":"what-students-need-to-know-and-be-able-to-do-in-k12-and-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/what-students-need-to-know-and-be-able-to-do-in-k12-and-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do in K12 and Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"student<\/a>After writing the previous blog<\/a> looking at the similarities and differences of competency education in K12 and higher education (HE), I just couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the learning outcomes as they cross over these two sectors.<\/p>\n

When discussing competency education, I\u2019ve heard the phrase \u201cK-16 competency-based pipeline\u201d several times over the past two months.\u00a0 The pipeline metaphor gets us into trouble, however, as it assumes once kids get into it they stay in it until they are pumped out at the other side into the labor market. It\u2019s an institutional top-down framework rather than a student-centered one.<\/p>\n

The K-16 pipeline metaphor also tends to emphasize college-readiness over career development and the dynamics of how youth and young adults get a foothold in the labor market. Students make choices, and sometimes things happen that may cause them to move from school to work during secondary school or fall out of the pipeline altogether, unless there are on-ramps back into school. Second, some students blend school and work throughout their years in high school and higher education in ways that make the most sense to them and of the situation. The idea that school and career are sequential steps just doesn\u2019t hold true. We don\u2019t have language to talk about the broad varieties of pathways, hampering our ability to design for it, as well.<\/p>\n

The following is a deeper dive into the topic of the intersections of K12 and higher education. There are certainly more questions than answers. Please share your insights, excitement about what is possible, and concerns in comments.<\/p>\n

Can We Shed More Light on the Transition to College?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear to me that we need to shine the light on the transition space between high school graduation, college admissions and the first day of freshman classes. We know it is murky because we keep asking what it means to be college ready, even after policies are passed. Districts and states trying to define a proficiency-based diploma will encounter this challenge once again.<\/p>\n

The reason that it is so murky is that college readiness is different for different colleges. Students are admitted to college and then are told they are not ready by putting them into remediation. Sure, ACT has evidence that if you hit certain scores, you are going to do okay in college. However, HE institutions have different levels of selectivity based on a variety of characteristics, including academic skills.<\/p>\n

Unpacking the transition space is an essential step in increasing equity and access. Transparency is essential if we are going to empower students, especially those without college-educated parents, to know exactly what they need to do to successfully compete for college admission. Certainly, high schools need to know, as well, so they can be sure they are providing effective feedback to help students who want to compete for more elite colleges.<\/p>\n

Although HE is focusing primarily on career-related programs in the conversion to competency education, it would be incredibly valuable if they would actually create some (it doesn\u2019t even have to be all) competency-based freshman courses so that we could have full transparency across the two systems. They would just need to identify what students need to know and be able to do in order to get a B or higher. I\u2019m not asking for common standards as we have in K12, just for HE to be explicit about what is expected of students in an entry-level course. If students could look at examples of proficient student work for a freshman world literature course or a chemistry class across different colleges, including their first choice, they would have a much better understanding while in high school of what they were driving towards. Thus, the motivation of college admissions could be focused more on learning than adding points to a GPA.<\/p>\n

If the transition space were more explicit, we could also stop acting as if high school graduation is actually a static line that students cross. We know that students leave high school with a range of skills. We need to know what the minimum is; however, given that students are learning a variety of academic, lifelong learning and technical skills, even the minimum expectations may be in the context of the full range of skills. If K12 and HE could tune or calibrate across sectors, proficiency-based diplomas could become a description of what students have learned and can do, capturing explicitly their skills within the transition space, let\u2019s say from 11th grade to the end of their freshman courses. This would certainly encourage many extrinsically motivated students as powerfully as the GPA does. But instead of just getting more points they would actually be doing deeper and farther.<\/p>\n

How Might We Define Competencies for Liberal Arts?<\/b><\/p>\n

EPIC<\/a> has defined prerequisite college and career readiness skills (although the definition is missing important pieces of career readiness \u2013 see discussion below) as:<\/p>\n