On 2/4/2011 7:26 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, SA wrote:
>
>> So it's not surprising that the younger cohort has higher literacy
>> scores than the older cohort - a pattern that exists in every country
>> in the OECD study. What's surprising is how limited the increase was
>> from one generation to the next. The increase is much greater in
>> every other OECD country. In the US, the younger cohort's scores are
>> +20 points lower than they would have been if the (very regular)
>> pan-OECD pattern had played out in the US.
>
> Forgive me if this has been asked before, but is it possible this was
> because the US was starting out from a higher literacy base?
It's true that the US "started out" (figuratively speaking) as one of the higher-literacy countries, generally behind only the Scandinavians. But then the Scandinavians experienced much larger increases than the US. For example, the 5 countries that "started out" higher than the US on the Quantitative test had an average score increase of 28 points, vs. 11 points for the US. More generally, while there was a tight relationship between a country's young-cohort scores and old-cohort scores (r-squared ~ 80%), there wasn't so much of a relationship between a country's "initial" score and the size of its subsequent increase (r-squared ~ 30%). So that can't explain it.
SA