NEW YORK, May 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Council for Aid to Education, Inc. (CAE), a nonprofit developer of performance-based and custom assessments that authentically measure students’ essential college and career readiness skills, today announced the launch of the Success Skills Assessment (SSA+). Built with technology-enhanced features, SSA+ is a 60-minute formative assessment designed to fit more easily into a school day and provide CAE’s clients with greater flexibility.
Delivered online through the organization’s Next Step platform, SSA+ leverages drag-and-drop functionality, highlighting and additional elements to help scaffold students’ critical thinking and problem solving skills. To enhance engagement, the authentic assessment situates students in real-world, complex decision environments where they must analyze and synthesize data, address important issues, propose solutions and recommend courses of action to resolve conflicts.
“We’re proud to deliver SSA+ and provide our clients with a formative performance-based assessment to measure and address individuals’ college and career readiness skills,” said Bob Yayac, president and CEO, CAE. “Our clients rely on us to create assessments that empower students to understand their skills while helping diagnose and provide insights to support their improvement.”
While SSA+ can be applied at any period during a student’s academic career, CAE recommends that institutions administer it early during secondary education and college. The results of the assessment can then be used to guide the appropriate developmental support, increasing the individuals’ readiness for their next step. CAE’s reporting has been restructured to provide quicker and clearer student diagnostic results.
In addition to SSA+, CAE’s authentic assessments include the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) and the College and Career Readiness Assessment (CCRA+). Each is focused on the essential student skills that impact student outcomes: critical thinking, problem solving and effective written communication. CAE also offers evidence-based micro-credentials that are tied to students’ performance levels on these assessments.
More information about CAE and SSA+ is available at www.cae.org.
About CAE
A nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve student outcomes, CAE develops performance-based and custom assessments that authentically measure students’ essential college and career readiness skills and identify opportunities for student growth. CAE’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) for higher education, College and Career Readiness Assessment (CCRA+) for secondary education, and the new Success Skills Assessment (SSA+) for any level, evaluate the skills educational institutions and employers demand most: critical thinking, problem solving and effective written communication. Based on CAE’s research, these skills are predictive of positive college and career outcomes. CAE also partners with its clients to design innovative performance assessments that measure the constructs vital to students, educators, and institutions, including subject area and grade specific assessments. Since 2002, more than 800,000 students at over 1,300 secondary and higher education institutions globally have completed CAE’s assessments. To learn more, please visit www.cae.org.