Reading Fluency: A Source of Insight in a Test-Optional World
Date
2020-08-01
Authors
Paige, David D.
Cassady, Elizabeth
Rupley, William H.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Texas State University, The Education Institute
Abstract
The task of college admissions officers is to identify applicants who are likely prepared to succeed at their institution. While student preparation is the domain of the continually changing K-12 educational landscape, it is left to college admission officers to evaluate the extent of that preparation on a student-by-student basis. Recently, a movement is taking place that has a rapidly increasing number of higher education institutions dropping the requirement for submission of standardized assessment scores for admission consideration (Furuta, 2017). Although authors have argued for and against their use, the task of winnowing qualified applicants from those who are not remains paramount to an institution’s success (Buckley et al., 2018). Indeed, in today’s world of institutional rankings, the success of every freshman class directly reflects the reported quality of the institution by publications such as U.S. News and World Report (Meyer et al., 2017; U.S. News & World Report, 2020). In the effort to identify qualified applicants, particularly for less selective institutions where the percent of those admitted exceeds the national average of 68% (Clinedinst, 2019), the ability to read and understand college-level texts is still an expectation of professors and has been identified as important to the applicant’s success (ACT, 2006; MacPhail, 2019). In this paper, we offer a perspective on the essential role of reading and how institutions might consider it in a mix of indicators predicting student success.
Description
Keywords
literacy, developmental English, reading acquisition, standardized test
Citation
Paige, D. D., Cassady, E., & Rupley, W. H. (2020). Reading fluency: A source of insight in a test-optional world. Journal of College Academic Support Programs, 3(1), pp. 59-62.