Introducing A New Measure of College and Career Readiness: The Mosaic Readiness Index

What makes a person “ready” for college and career? Certainly, to be ready to succeed in education or in the workforce, one needs a certain level of academic knowledge, and ACT has defined college readiness standards for English, Mathematics, Reading, Science, and Writing. But academic knowledge is not enough. Most of us probably know someone who was intelligent enough to succeed at school and work but, for one reason or another, did not. Maybe that person just didn’t have a strong work ethic. Maybe they couldn’t handle stress very well. Maybe they just couldn’t get along well with other students or coworkers. Clearly, there are other skills in addition to academic knowledge that are necessary for success. 

These “other” important skills can be described as social and emotional skills, which are often taught in school via social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. At ACT, we measure five core social and emotional skills, which are listed and defined below.

These skills are based on the Big Five framework, a well-researched framework which can be used to parsimoniously organize social and emotional skills. Voluminous research has demonstrated that these skills are related to success in college and the workforce. 

For example, meta-analyses have found that social and emotional skills predict both grade point average and retention in college. Importantly, several meta-analyses show that these skills can be taught at school and that developing them leads to improved academic performance.

A recent synthesis of 50 meta-analyses has also verified these skills’ ability to predict performance in the workforce. And these skills are becoming more and more important at work. For instance, a 2021 McKinsey study found that companies are increasingly focused on developing their employees’ social and emotional skills, including skills such as leadership, interpersonal skills, and empathy.  

In some of our own recent work, we have found that high school students’ social and emotional skills, as measured by the Mosaic SEL Assessment, are correlated with their ACT test scores and, relatedly, to their college readiness. For example, as the figure below shows, 27% of students high in Sustaining Effort meet ACT’s STEM College Readiness Benchmark for STEM, whereas only 10% of students low in Sustaining Effort meet this benchmark. 

To help make the connection between students’ social and emotional skills and their college readiness clearer, we recently added the Mosaic Readiness Index to the reporting dashboard for the Mosaic™ by ACT® Social Emotional Learning high school assessment. The index is similar to ACT’s previous ACT Engage Success Index and was created by combining the Mosaic by ACT SEL items that were found to be the most highly related to students’ ACT scores, their high school grades, and their high school course work. It provides educators with a single score that can be used to identify students who may be in need of additional academic support. For example, students at the lowest levels of the index typically have much lower high school GPAs and ACT scores and, if they enroll in college, a lower chance of graduating than student at higher levels of the index. 

The Mosaic Readiness Index provides a reliable and trustworthy measure based on research and data that only an organization like ACT can provide, and greatly simplifies the process of interpreting the meaning and significance of student assessment scores. We believe this new tool will be invaluable in helping educators help students on their journeys toward achieving readiness for college and, eventually, their careers.