Conley Readiness Index

Helping you equip your students with stronger self-awareness for a successul transition into university and beyond

The Conley Readiness Index (CRI) is a 30 minute online analysis tool that assesses students’ strengths and weaknesses and identifies gaps between their aspirations and their skills.

It shows students how to improve their chances of success – both at the start of their university journey and, when the diagnostic is repeated, throughout their studies and into their career.

Complementing the interventions you already have in place, educators can use individual reports generated on completion of the CRI to offer personalised feedback at scale, regardless of whether students are studying online, part-time or on campus.

The importance of supporting student readiness

A number of recent research reports have indicated that many students are not adequately prepared for university life when they start their degree course, nor are they ready to transition to the start of their careers on completion. High first year dropout rates, student stress levels and teaching frustrations affect many UK institutions.

The HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey 2019¹ reports that around 40% of students did not feel prepared when they began university, with only a small proportion of entrants claiming to have felt really well prepared.

A Guardian Student Experience Survey² in 2017 showed that “almost 9 in 10 (87%) of first year students [found] it difficult to cope with social or academic aspects of university life”. Many are unsure of what to expect, and a large proportion state that the transition from school or college to university is a source of considerable anxiety. The issue of anxiety is an increasingly serious problem, with a year-on-year decline in the percentage of students reporting low anxiety³.

1 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Student-Academic-Experience-Survey-2019.pdf
2 https://upp-ltd.com/student-
3 https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Student-Academic-Experience-Survey-2019

How does it work?

The CRI can be taken at any time but is best used initially as an early diagnostic within the first few months of starting their higher education studies, and then taken again later in the course to measure progress. Accessing and using CRI is straightforward:

1. Students access the CRI tool via a unique url embedded into your VLE

2. Students are asked a series of questions which take around 30 minutes to complete

3. A personalised report is provided for each student that focuses on the skills they need to develop further, which they can then share with a tutor, academic adviser or study skills tutor.

You can use the data and reports to offer students individual, personalised feedback that better supports their need, regardless of whether they are studying online, part-time or on campus. It also provides insight that enables you to adapt existing courses or your approach to university transition.

Sample extract from a CRI report

Improving chances of student success

The CRI shows students how they think, act, learn and transition into university, generating outputs thatactively encourages students to adopt behaviours or seek outresources to remediate identified skills gaps.

The Conley Model is based on 42 ‘actionable’ skills and competencies that students and educators can focus on in order to improve readiness for higher education and career success.

These skills and competencies are organised into 4 broad areas called the Four Keys:

Key Cognitive Strategies
Key Content Knowledge
Key Learning Skills & Techniques
Key Transition Knowledge & Skills

The CRI is built on over a decade of research in the US (and has been piloted in UK universities), analysing the content of undergraduate degree programmes and the opinions of thousands of secondary and post-secondary students and educators about what it takes to succeed in higher education.

Over 100,000 students have used CRI, and their feedback shows that they value the role of CRI in helping them to identify areas beyond basic content knowledge in need of improvement and better understand their readiness to learn and succeed.

Learn more

Please get in touch using the form below to find out more about the Conley Readiness Index.