On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 05:50 PM, Kelley wrote:
> >
> > IIRC, though, it doesn't seem like the National Literacy Survey stats
> > bear this claim out.
> >
>
> i'm seeing in my students that they can read the words in front of them
> on a page, but often (a) it takes them a long time to do it, (b) their
> vocabulary is limited (and they show no interest in expanding it), (c)
> they haven't read much if anything, and (d) they write very poorly,
> even to the point of understanding what a sentence is, but more often a
> general inability to communicate ideas (which makes one wonder about
> their ability to *think* and *understand* ideas). purely anecdotally,
> then, i would guess that people are more functionally literate in the
> sense that they can read and understand and write wrt forms, do grocery
> shopping, buy tickets, whatever, but they can't and don't, say, read
> even john grisham, much less capital.
It cracks me up that you can read criticisms like this of "ignorant youth" that go all the way back to ancient Greece. I'll say it again, because it does not seem to be well known: we have a well- studied, standardized measure of reading, math, and logical skills that has been around since 1916 (Stanford-Binet intelligence test). Terman wanted this to be a measure of generalized intelligence; I agree with critics of the IQ test that it is not. However, it is a very effective and valid measure of academic skills, and it can be used to assess this idea of "declining" academic abilities and educational standards over time.
James Flynn has discovered that raw performance on IQ tests is increasing about 4-6 pts per decade. This may not seem like much, but appreciate the substantial long-term effects: (a) take a person who scored 100 (average) on an IQ test in 1920, put them in a time machine, and have them take the test today: They would score about 60-65 (borderline mentally retarded). (b) take a person who scores average on an IQ test today, put them in a time machine, and have them take the 1920 test: They would score about 135-140 (near genius level!).
Exactly why academic skills are increasing so dramatically is being still being debated and studied; however, this increase is well documented. It exasperates me that so many people pay attention to sloppy anecdotal reasoning about "students nowadays" and ignore the diligent scientific research on this topic.
Miles