I read good
A report came out a few days ago which confirms, yet again, that high-level skills are frighteningly absent from our classrooms. The report, authored by ACT, leads with the fact that
This number is down from a high of 55% in 1999 and is actually one percentage point below what it was way back in 1994.
Lest you think the metric itself is flawed or overly rigorous, this is the ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading:
It's not that reading is important, it's that reading is everything. No student can reach a reasonable level fo proficiency, much less mastery, in any subject -- math, science, english, history or otherwise -- without being able to read capably. There are a litany of indicators showing that the reading skills are not being imparted adaquately, and those sit beside the report's similar offerings of international comparisons such as the PISA and statistics gathered by the Alliance for Excellent Education.
To get very specific, we're talking about:
Although the ACT report largely targets high schools, I'm even more disturbed by the fact that only 62% of 8th graders are on track to be ready to meet that basic college reading comprehension level. The problem is everywhere in K-12. Again, it's not that every student needs to go to college -- it's that every student needs the opportunity to go to college.
There aren't many reasonable explanations for the overwhelming and ever-mounting body of evidence about the lack of high-order skills our students have than those which focus on the classroom. We're forging an inadaquate product out of the current crucible of assessments, standards and pedagogical thought. Though there have been some positive advances over the past several years, the fact is that in the most critical ways, we're losing ground. It's not going to take just better teaching, better assessments and better, more rigorous standards, it's going to take a commitment to ingraining thinking skills in every aspect of our curricula and shifting our system so that it revolves around that singular crux.
Just over half of our students are able to meet the demands of college-level reading, based on ACT’s national readiness indicator. Only 51 percent of ACT-tested high school graduates met ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark for Reading, demonstrating their readiness to handle the reading requirements for typical credit-bearing first-year college coursework, based on the 2004–2005 results of the ACT.
This number is down from a high of 55% in 1999 and is actually one percentage point below what it was way back in 1994.
Lest you think the metric itself is flawed or overly rigorous, this is the ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading:
ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark for Reading represents the level of achievement required for students to have a high probability of success (a 75 percent chance of earning a course grade of C or better, a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better) in such credit-bearing college courses as Psychology and U.S. History -- first-year courses generally considered to be typically reading dependent. The benchmark corresponds to a score of 21 on the ACT Reading Test.
It's not that reading is important, it's that reading is everything. No student can reach a reasonable level fo proficiency, much less mastery, in any subject -- math, science, english, history or otherwise -- without being able to read capably. There are a litany of indicators showing that the reading skills are not being imparted adaquately, and those sit beside the report's similar offerings of international comparisons such as the PISA and statistics gathered by the Alliance for Excellent Education.
To get very specific, we're talking about:
(1) inadequate understanding of the words used in the text;
(2) inadequate background knowledge about the domains represented in the text;
(3) a lack of familiarity with the semantic and syntactic structures that can help to predict the relationships between words;
(4) a lack of knowledge about different writing conventions that are used to achieve different purposes via text (humor, explanation, dialogue, etc.);
(5) [limited] verbal reasoning ability which enables the reader to “read between the lines”; and
(6) the [in]ability to remember verbal information.
Although the ACT report largely targets high schools, I'm even more disturbed by the fact that only 62% of 8th graders are on track to be ready to meet that basic college reading comprehension level. The problem is everywhere in K-12. Again, it's not that every student needs to go to college -- it's that every student needs the opportunity to go to college.
There aren't many reasonable explanations for the overwhelming and ever-mounting body of evidence about the lack of high-order skills our students have than those which focus on the classroom. We're forging an inadaquate product out of the current crucible of assessments, standards and pedagogical thought. Though there have been some positive advances over the past several years, the fact is that in the most critical ways, we're losing ground. It's not going to take just better teaching, better assessments and better, more rigorous standards, it's going to take a commitment to ingraining thinking skills in every aspect of our curricula and shifting our system so that it revolves around that singular crux.
This entry was posted
on Friday, March 10, 2006 at 2:18 PM.
|
