I've gone on in comments a bit about how many teens and twenty-somethings have trouble reading more than a few paragraphs or maybe a couple of pages and so university professors have, in general, adapted by giving shorter and shorter readings for classes.
Now the College Board has followed suit with the SAT and it looks like the ACT is making similar changes.*
The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”
...
Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.
The math section has been made easier over the last 15 years as well.
*Although the author of the article is Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which is trying to compete with the SAT and ACT, the SAT published the changes and defends them.
If the shorter form gives as good an assessment of ability I'm all for it. I share your worry that this might be capitulating to some bad cultural/educational developments, but OTOH, perhaps it was always unnecessarily long - just because older test designers thought that longer was better. I never liked the writing test anyway. It added nothing to the SATV and was instituted to keep Chinese students from beating the American white kids, which strikes me as devious.
ReplyDeleteAlso SAT was "recentered" in 1995, made a little easier in math and a moderate amount in verbal. This may have been reasonable, as more students with lesser ability were taking the test, exposing what may have been an overestimate of ability at the high end. It raised the average about 50 points, with a range of 25-75 points.
The math does worry me. The SATQ was changed over a few years around 1970 because the boys did better than the girls, especially at the highest levels, so the reasoning was that the test just must be wrong. They started keeping track of questions that boys did disproportionately well at and eliminated those. Only those items that both sexes answered evenly made the cut. Simplifying now may be cheapening the test.
Yet perhaps not. High school math used to be more lock-step, with freshmen taking Alg I, sophomores Geometry, juniors Alg II or Trig, and seniors taking Adv topics or Calculus or both. Though math builds year on year (and that is part of what the test is measuring, how high you can build the house of cards if we don't let you take a break), being away from a topic erodes your ability. You can ace trig and do much worse at it two years later. So the modern practice of letting the best students start Algebra in 8th grade, or even 7th brings them ever more distant from some of the less-used corners of math they learned just fine, because they are a year or two more distant from it as seniors. The scores have less reliability.
Sure, if it does as good a job, it's fine. I have questions about that and would like to see the research on it.
DeleteWhat flagged this for me is that it seems to go along with what I've been hearing from teachers and professors for years about declining literacy, and specifically students having trouble handling longer readings, or possibly just refusing to do longer readings. Whether they can't or won't isn't clear. Of course, maybe it's really just an attention span problem and not really a literacy problem. Maybe the College Board's constructs and validation are good and the problem lies elsewhere.
It is ironic that we are training a generation of illiterates to guide LLMs that have been trained on a large subset of the entirety of human literature. They not only won’t see the problems, they won’t even get the references.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's a whole other thing.
DeleteLast fall The Atlantic ran a good article titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books." It talks about students admitted to Ivy League schools who've never been asked to read a whole book in their K-12 education. Yeah, we've all skimmed books we've been assigned sometimes, or often, but they've never even been assigned a whole book, just "excerpts, poetry, and news articles".
ReplyDeleteOne reason I do these extended commentaries on things like Xenophon or Aristotle is that it is a good discipline to tackle a whole work from start to finish. Often it's fine to read 'the good parts version' a la The Princess Bride, but at least sometimes you should go through the whole thing.
DeleteMaybe we should start with fun works, though, just to develop the discipline of struggling through giant walls of text. The descriptions in Ivanhoe go on far too long for modern taste, and mostly aren't really necessary to the story; but the story is good enough that kids might keep up with it.
Yes, fun stuff first, maybe sprinkled with some deeper snippets to let them know that's out there, as a kind of foreshadowing, if you will.
DeleteI followed Torres's link to the College Board's technical manual on the ACT and it's interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the construct for reading and writing because that's where they tell you what they think they're assessing. On p. 30 it gives the following:
The construct (concept) intended to be measured by the digital SAT Suite’s Reading and Writing section is literacy achievement relative to core college and career readiness requirements in English language arts as well as in the academic disciplines of literature, history/social studies, the humanities, and science.
So, it's possible that as college courses included less reading, the SAT was simply adjusted to account for that. Of course, if the Atlantic article is right, college profs are assigning less reading because students only learn to read shorter stuff in the K-12 system. Why would that be? It could be that the emphasis on standardized testing led teachers to "teach to the test." If the test only has readings up to 750 words, why ask students to read anything longer?
But that's all conjecture on my part.
I don't know why I put "ACT" in there when it was clearly for the SAT.
DeleteIn my usual skewed comment style- Why learn to read at all? Just ask your phone for the synopsis.
ReplyDeleteBrutal, maybe, but I suspect very close to the truth.
My guess is kids do not learn to read because it is not fun- their imaginations have been sucked away by an endless video stream.
Have you ever been disappointed by a movie because it is not as good as the book, and the lush characters that you created in your head, have been turned to flat art or caricatures by the screen? Kids don't have this happen because they never walked those fields of imagination in their minds in the first place.
I think you're absolutely right. I don't think this is some big conspiracy. It's just how things are going with the development of technology and with human nature being what it is.
Delete...training a generation of illiterates to guide LLMs that have been trained on a large subset of the entirety of human literature. They not only won’t see the problems, they won’t even get the references.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's a whole other thing.
Nor will they see that the LLMs really aren't being trained on a balanced subset, but only on subsets selected by the ones programming the LLMs and the ones approving the final products for release--no matter how well-meaning and balanced-intended those programmers and approvers might be.
Eric Hines
I can tell you that the reading and data retention abilities of younger people have changed since 2016. More I don't feel comfortable saying.
ReplyDeleteI suspect it is a combination of social media, games, less parental emphasis on long-form reading, and how reading on-line (specifically web sites and LLMs) differs from reading print or even e-ink.
LittleRed1
I don’t doubt it. MY capacity has diminished, which is one reason I keep fighting against it. It’s the phones, mostly.
DeleteMine, too. I used to come home from the library with a stack of books arm deep. Now all the reading I do is technical or on a blog.
ReplyDelete