Occupations with higher hourly wages face a substantially lower likelihood of being automated. We need to help students develop strong skills through a robust training and education agenda to ensure that they benefit from changes in technology, and are able to stay employed as the workers of the future.
To operationalize college and career readiness approaches within secondary schools, an effort must be made to utilize existing interventions and strategies as well as data-informed efforts included within multitiered systems of support.
On March 8–10, EPIC researchers Ross Anderson, Michael Thier, and Paul Beach presented at the 41st annual conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) in Denver, Colorado.…
In this paper, we [Matthew Gaertner, David Conley, and Paul Stoltz] attempt to clarify the readiness landscape. We introduce three readiness paradigms—the college readiness index for middle school students, the Conley Readiness Index, and GRIT—and review their goals, theoretical foundations, and empirical support.
Much of our work is based on the Four Keys to College and Career Readiness model, developed by our founder, Dr. David Conley, and EPIC staff. It incorporates over a decade of research on what it takes to succeed in college and career. Download a student-friendly poster that explains what it takes to be college and career ready.
Many educators, families, and students are taking a hard look at the current educational system in the United States and finding there is a significant gap between what is and what ought to be if we want our country to succeed in the 21st century. The Four Keys to College and Career Readiness (the Four Keys) provides a framework and common language to use as we work to close this gap by developing systems that support all students as they prepare for the future.
The South Carolina College and Career Readiness Toolkit was designed to foster conversation among leaders from school districts and higher education about what it means to be college and career ready, and to help develop action plans for new and strengthened partnerships. The Center of Excellence for College and Career Readiness (the Center) worked with the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) to develop these materials in support of statewide comprehensive planning efforts. The toolkit has some information specific to South Carolina, but can serve as a model for all states and districts wishing to implement a comprehensive college and career readiness action plan.
This policy brief from EPIC discusses the United State’s bias toward college-going as the gold standard and how to counteract that singular mode of thinking. EPIC outlines why definitions of K–12 success should balance an emphasis on each C (college and career). EPIC also shows the related pitfalls of districts failing to attend to the issues that are most salient for their communities. To avoid those dangers, EPIC recommends democratizing postsecondary pathway access to ensure equity, localizing districts’ definitions of success to suit community needs, and personalizing educational experiences so students can become ready on their own terms.
Yesterday I presented to over 60 educators and community members in Tulare County specific to using a framework for college and career readiness. During the conversation, we discussed the need…
This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills—collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection.