Another straw on the camel's back
In another indicator of the flagging education system, the recent release of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy results shows that high-level comprehension skills are down among college graduates. As the Washington Post notes,
This is a particularly instructive measure because it looks at down-the-road effects of K-12 education. First, it's worthwhile to go over the definitions of the NAAL achievement levels:
The high school graduate numbers (those who didn't proceed to higher ed.) are interesting in their own right -- over half of graduates are at a below basic or basic level with regards to prose, while 42% read documents at the lowest two levels. Less than 5% of high school graduates read at a proficient level. And all of these numbers are worse than they were a decade ago.
What to make of the decline? First, it's clear yet again that our K-12 education system is not providing an appropriate curriculum nor appropriate pedagogy if one in two students who successfully graduate high school do so at best able to perform tasks on the level of parsing through TV Guide (pg. 3). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a third of them aren't reading novels in English class.
Secondly, while experts are falling over themselves trying to come up with an explanation for the drastic 10-year decline in college literacy skill, I'll offer a hypothesis of my own: Emphasis on fact-based standardized tests draws emphasis away from high-level critical thinking skills. This isn't a "standardized tests are the devil" rant (i've made my position on them clear many times), but rather an observation that I think most people would agree with; over the past decade, as the "Standards Movement" has become firmly entrenched, so has relatively low-level instruction.
End-of-course tests may be taken as a reasonable measure of learning expectations, and in almost all cases standardized tests are multiple-choice or constructed-response items that require what Bloom would call "knowledge" or "comprehension," the two lowest rungs on his taxonomy. Studies have consistently backed up that the higher-level skills -- analysis, synthesis, evaluation -- are exceptions rather than the rule. Yet these are exactly the skills that one needs to fit into the NAAL's "proficient" category, and to a lesser degree the "intermediate" group. So, if a byproduct of the push for accountability has been a reduction in the structural rigor of the curriculum and pedagogy, a loss in high-level reading skills is exactly what we would anticipate. It certainly synchs with the relative stagnation of long-term NAEP proficiency levels.
It's true that this malaise is not found in math performance, but I would submit that math pedagogy (and the Math Wars) is a different beast altogether, as math lends itself and was already largely targetted towards the one-right-answer standardized test mentality. In this case, the pressure to succeed and accountability had nowhere to push achievement but up.
I don't know how much more evidence needs to mount that our schools are not adequately teaching critical thinking skills. NAAL, NAEP, TIMSS, HSSSE, state assessments... I would love to hear an argument to the contrary. And, if we indeed aren't teaching critical thinking skills, then there are a whole series of new discussions that need to start, and they need to start soon.
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.
This is a particularly instructive measure because it looks at down-the-road effects of K-12 education. First, it's worthwhile to go over the definitions of the NAAL achievement levels:
Adults at the Below Basic level range from being nonliterate in English to having the abilities listed below:
-locating easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose texts
-locating easily identifiable information and following written instructions in simple documents (e.g., charts or forms)
-locating numbers and using them to perform simple quantitative operations (primarily addition) when the mathematical information is very concrete and familiar
Basic
-reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts
-reading and understanding information in simple documents
-locating easily identifiable quantitative information and using it to solve simple, one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred
Intermediate
-reading and understanding moderately dense, less commonplace prose texts as well as summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose
-locating information in dense, complex documents and making simple inferences about the information
-locating less familiar quantitative information and using it to solve problems when the arithmetic operation is not specified or easily inferred
Proficient
-reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences
-integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing multiple pieces of information located in complex documents
-locating more abstract quantitative information and using it to solve multistep problems when the arithmetic operations are not easily inferred and the problems are more complex
The high school graduate numbers (those who didn't proceed to higher ed.) are interesting in their own right -- over half of graduates are at a below basic or basic level with regards to prose, while 42% read documents at the lowest two levels. Less than 5% of high school graduates read at a proficient level. And all of these numbers are worse than they were a decade ago.
What to make of the decline? First, it's clear yet again that our K-12 education system is not providing an appropriate curriculum nor appropriate pedagogy if one in two students who successfully graduate high school do so at best able to perform tasks on the level of parsing through TV Guide (pg. 3). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a third of them aren't reading novels in English class.
Secondly, while experts are falling over themselves trying to come up with an explanation for the drastic 10-year decline in college literacy skill, I'll offer a hypothesis of my own: Emphasis on fact-based standardized tests draws emphasis away from high-level critical thinking skills. This isn't a "standardized tests are the devil" rant (i've made my position on them clear many times), but rather an observation that I think most people would agree with; over the past decade, as the "Standards Movement" has become firmly entrenched, so has relatively low-level instruction.
End-of-course tests may be taken as a reasonable measure of learning expectations, and in almost all cases standardized tests are multiple-choice or constructed-response items that require what Bloom would call "knowledge" or "comprehension," the two lowest rungs on his taxonomy. Studies have consistently backed up that the higher-level skills -- analysis, synthesis, evaluation -- are exceptions rather than the rule. Yet these are exactly the skills that one needs to fit into the NAAL's "proficient" category, and to a lesser degree the "intermediate" group. So, if a byproduct of the push for accountability has been a reduction in the structural rigor of the curriculum and pedagogy, a loss in high-level reading skills is exactly what we would anticipate. It certainly synchs with the relative stagnation of long-term NAEP proficiency levels.
It's true that this malaise is not found in math performance, but I would submit that math pedagogy (and the Math Wars) is a different beast altogether, as math lends itself and was already largely targetted towards the one-right-answer standardized test mentality. In this case, the pressure to succeed and accountability had nowhere to push achievement but up.
I don't know how much more evidence needs to mount that our schools are not adequately teaching critical thinking skills. NAAL, NAEP, TIMSS, HSSSE, state assessments... I would love to hear an argument to the contrary. And, if we indeed aren't teaching critical thinking skills, then there are a whole series of new discussions that need to start, and they need to start soon.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 26, 2005 at 11:38 AM.
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