More Promising Results Evaluating the Effectiveness of Career and College Clubs Participation on College Enrollment Technical Brief

© 2015 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. ACT Explore® is a registered trademark of ACT, Inc.Technical Brief ACT Research & Policy4288Ty Cruce is a director in Statistical and Applied Research specializing in the study of student preferences and decision making during the college choice process.Krista Mattern is a director in Statistical and Applied Research specializing in the validity and fairness of assessment scores as well as more general issues in higher education such as enrollment, persistence, and graduation.James Sconing is a retired assistant vice president for Research at ACT specializing in predictive modeling.AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Joseph Booth and Quentin Wilson from ALL Management Corporation and Michelle Croft and Kurt Burkum from ACT for providing feedback on early drafts of this manuscript.ACT Technical Briefs provide reliability, validity, and other psychometric analyses on ACT education and workforce development assessments, services, and programs and those of its partners. For more on ACT Explore, visit www.act.org.More Promising Results: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Career & College Clubs Participation on College EnrollmentTy Cruce, PhDKrista Mattern, PhDJames Sconing, PhDIntroductionIn light of the large number of students dropping out of high school and, more generally, the failure of many students to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to pursue a personally rewarding future,1 the Career & College Clubs program (CCC; careerandcollegeclubs.org) was developed to assist middle school youth in becoming ready for a college education and future career. The underlying model of CCC has three main components: early engagement, student-driven learning, and a fun and supportive learning environment. The program emphasizes early engagement because, the reasoning goes, middle school is a critical period for students to define their future and establish strong personal skills such as ambition and leadership. Intervening at a later date may be too late to have the needed effect on college and career success. The program is student-driven in that the peer-to-peer learning that takes place empowers the students to take ownership over their learning. Finally, the learning environment is fun and supportive because the program’s theory of action is that “if we engage at-risk middle school students in a peer-to-peer learning environment where they lead fun activities on the topics of career, college, and life skills; then these students will feel a greater sense of empowerment, as well as an intrinsic drive to plan for, and achieve, success in high school, college, and life.”2The program implementation works through a distributed system. Within a school, a coach (typically a counselor or a teacher) invites a subset of students to participate as CCC mentors. Coaches are advised to recruit students who are perceived as influential in the school. That is, students are chosen based on their leadership qualities. Working with the coaches, CCC mentors are provided a defined curriculum designed to increase awareness of the antecedents of career, college, and life success.3 The curriculum is divided into two areas: exploration and engagement. Sample exploration topics include “Why Higher Education?,” “Exploring Career Options,” and “Financial Literacy.” Sample engagement topics include “College Admission Process” and “College Life.” The CCC mentors pass on what they have learned from the CCC curriculum to their peers. The goal is to infuse the curriculum throughout the school; in turn, this should lead to greater success for the student body as a whole. 2 ACT Research & Policy More Promising Resultsschool year. Operationally, the outcome is dichotomous, where: =1 enrolled in college0 did not enroll in college. For this study, we hypothesized that the decision to attend college is a function of the students’ participation as a CCC mentor, their prior academic achievement, whether or not they were a member of a traditionally underserved racial or ethnic group (i.e., African American, American Indian, or Hispanic), the percentage of underserved students at their school, and the percentage of students at their school who were eligible for either a free or reduced-price lunch. The measure of prior academic achievement used in this study is each student’s ACT Explore Composite score, defined as the arithmetic average of the student’s scores across the four subject tests (i.e., English, mathematics, reading, and science) offered as part of the test battery. The student’s racial/ethnic identity was self-reported on a survey provided as a standard part of the ACT Explore test materials. School-level data regarding both the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch and the distribution of students by race/ethnicity originated from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data for the 2009–10 school year and was matched to students’ test records