The College-readiness Performance Assessment System (C-PAS) is designed to create new methods to assess the college-readiness of high school students. New methods are necessary because current assessments and tests do not necessarily gauge student cognitive capabilities and strategies of the type they will be expected to demonstrate in entry-level college courses and beyond. As American secondary school classrooms attempt to become more data driven and as more high school students set college as their goal, it is critical that teachers have the right set of data to enable them to make instructional decisions that better prepare their students for postsecondary education and that students have a clearer picture of how ready they are for college courses. C-PAS is being designed specifically to provide this type of information to teachers and students so high school instruction leads to college-readiness for more students.

C-PAS is a series of performance tasks that teachers administer within the context of their curriculum and score with a common scoring guide. The results yield a performance profile composed of scores from up to five key cognitive strategies. The teacher separately grades the task for inclusion as a component in the course grade, thereby increasing student engagement in the task. The scores generated by C-PAS are useful to teachers as they consider how well their curriculum is helping students to reason, solve problems, interpret information, conduct research, and generate work with precision and accuracy. The tasks are carefully designed to encourage the development of key cognitive strategies that have been identified through research on entry-level college courses as being important elements of such courses.

C-PAS does not seek to replace state assessments or to compete with them. In fact, C-PAS tasks are aligned with state assessments when possible. The goal is to prepare students for the rigors of college courses while simultaneously addressing the accountability demands of state and federal exams. When properly implemented, C-PAS helps guide and encourage instruction toward more challenging levels of student engagement that requires careful thought and execution to produce high quality student work.

C-PAS can perhaps best be thought of as an extension of previous attempts to bring more authentic assessment to scale. In particular, C-PAS takes advantage of what has been learned from seven years of implementation in Oregon of the Proficiency-based Admission Standards System (PASS) and of the Washington Alternative Assessment, both of which were designed and piloted by the project's principal investigator, Dr. David Conley. Over a 15-year period, Dr. Conley's work has detailed the key content knowledge and cognitive strategies associated with success in entry-level credit-bearing general education college courses as well as the means to asses college-readiness on a large scale through analyses of student work.

One central finding from this research is that college instruction is different from high school instruction to the degree in which students are expected to be proficient in a number of key cognitive strategies in order to understand the material they are being taught. Postsecondary faculty across the full spectrum of institutions, from the nation's most selective universities to open enrollment environments, have spoken with one voice on this topic: students must be able to think in order to succeed.

The types of thinking can also now be specified in some detail. Students in almost all entry-level general education courses are expected to be able to compare and contrast points of view; to interpret findings and contradictory data; to support an opinion with justifying source material; to construct a logical argument and defend it when challenged; and to solve complex problems, including those without obvious solutions or simple step-by-step solution procedures. In addition, students are expected to be able to complete assignments and projects with precision and accuracy and not make the types of mistakes borne from lack of attention to detail.

The goal of this project is to develop an assessment system that gauges student performance and development from sixth through twelfth grade on a set of key cognitive strategies associated with success in entry-level college courses. The assessments are incorporated into the curriculum. They encourage and support teaching practices that focus on building student reasoning, analysis, and cognitive processing. They guide teachers and encourage them to incorporate activities that stimulate higher order thinking within the context of challenging content. They help encourage creativity in the classroom. They contribute to readiness for state high school assessments by reinforcing important content knowledge and strengthening reasoning. Perhaps most importantly, this assessment system is designed to ensure that far more students enter postsecondary education much better prepared for the expectations that will confront them almost from the minute they walk into their first class.

• more on assessment