Reports

This year’s edition lays out the trends and challenges facing higher education globally in adopting education technologies and creating new ones that support broader improvements in learning and student success. On the short-term horizon: analytics technologies and new learning spaces. Already in demand, they will grow even more prevalent in the next couple of years as academe increasingly focuses on measuring what students are learning and providing them with new educational experiences, such as active-learning classrooms and makerspaces.

Because of a confluence of economic and technological forces, the United States now has an opportunity to rebuild its manufacturing base and restore its global competitiveness. But another report will not help. Bold steps commensurate with the scale and importance of the objectives are absolutely necessary. Implementing these bold steps requires a national focal point of responsibility with a comprehensive strategy and significant and sustained public and private investments. Other countries are not standing still. The onus is on us.

ACT’s fifth and latest edition of its annual STEM report focuses on the more than 2 million students in the 2017 US high school graduating class—60 percent of all the nation’s graduates—who took the ACT® test. The ACT is the only college readiness exam in the US with a full science test and also the only one that reports a STEM score and a STEM College Readiness Benchmark score indicating students’ readiness to succeed in college courses such as calculus, biology, chemistry and physics, which are typically required for a college STEM-related major.

Young children are naturally curious about the world around them. They mix water and dirt to create mud, ask whether plants eat food like people do, follow ants marching along a sidewalk crack, and wonder about everything they see. With help from adults, these early experiences are key to developing the important thinking and reasoning skills that children will later use to explore increasingly complex questions about how the world works.