What's Happening to the Test Scores?

Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think And What We Can Do About It
by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 5)

In a highbrow private school in Manhattan, a college counselor laments, "Look at these verbal SAT scores! How am I ever going to get these kids into the colleges their parents want?" While this counselor has good reason for concern, he may be somewhat comforted by the fact that his students are certainly not unique.

Very few tests in the United States have stayed the same long enough to provide a long-range view of young people's abilities across the past few decades. Three organizations producing the most consistently standardized measurements have been the College Board, which publishes the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) taken by students who intend to apply to college, the similar American College Testing program (ACT), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests academic achievement of school children at representative grade levels. As anyone who even scans the headlines knows, they have shown drastically declining scores, particularly in the areas of higher-level verbal and reasoning skills.

Although the SAT has been criticized for a number of failings, including various types of bias, it provides a consistent source of data over a period of years. Purportedly a test of ability rather than of what has been learned, the test is, in fact, highly dependent on background experiences such as vocabulary exposure, reading facility, and math courses taken. By the time students are in high school, it is difficult to separate out the various effects of school learning and native ability. Thus its scores reflect both basic intelligence and experience.

Starting in 1964, average SAT verbal and math scores declined steadily until the mid-1980s, when they leveled off and then experienced a very slight rise. Subsequently, math scores have remained stable and verbal have begun another gradual decline. Overall, verbal declines have been considerably greater, 47 points by 1988 (from 475 to 428) as opposed to 22 for math (498 to 476).

Losses of this magnitude have caused justifiable concern, and many reasons have been proposed for this apparent erosion of national brainpower. The fact that a less rarefied group of students, including more from less "privileged" educational backgrounds, now take the test has been shown to account for some, but not all, of the decline in average scores. Recently, in fact, scores of minorities are the only ones showing consistent improvement, with black students particularly making impressive gains. Moreover, the past few years have seen the growing popularity of courses that claim great success in coaching students in test-related subject matter and test-taking "tricks." These should have raised scores at least a little, particularly for the more privileged group who can afford the courses. Is it possible that without their influence, overall declines would be even greater?

For all students, steady increases in television viewing and less time spent reading are accepted as negative influences on verbal scores. The culpability of those factors, as we shall see in later chapters, goes far beyond what most people are willing to admit. Schools have also been blamed for giving less homework, lowering academic standards, and using less challenging materials. Of course, teachers complain they have been forced to these expedients because of skill deficits in the students they are attempting to teach. In short, no one really agrees on the reasons. Everyone agrees, however, that the situation is serious. Most alarming is the suggestion that the "top" layer of students, our potential pool of future leaders, is being seriously affected.

The "Best and the Brightest"

To investigate this possibility I contacted The Educational Testing Service, which publishes results of Graduate Record Examinations which are taken by a self-selected group of students who intend to pursue graduate study. I learned right away that it is hard to extract any firm evidence about scoring trends on these tests for several reasons, which I will explain shortly. Nevertheless, in digging through the data from the last fifteen years, I did find some interesting clues indicating that both interest and ability in primarily verbal fields of study appear to have declined rather startlingly.

The GREs include general measures of verbal, quantitative, and analytical ability as well as subject area tests in a number of disciplines such as history, English literature, psychology, math, etc. The subject tests are optional, as they are required for admission only to certain departments in certain schools. GRE scores must be cautiously interpreted in terms of general trends, since rising scores may indicate simply that brighter students, on the whole, are choosing to apply to graduate school, and vice versa. Moreover, the growing use of "prep" courses may also mask declining ability of GRE applicants.

Increasing numbers of students whose primary language is not English have unquestionably affected verbal scores on the general intelligence tests which all applicants are required to take. The percentage of total GRE test-takers who are not U.S. citizens has more than doubled since 1975 to about 16%. Since a large proportion of these students are math and science majors, math and analytic scores would be expected to rise, which they have. Between 1972 and 1987, average quantitative scores rose from 512 to 550; analytic scores have also increased. In the same period, however, verbal scores fell from 497 to 477.

This overall decline in verbal abilities may not be totally attributable to foreign-born applicants, since the same trend shows up on subject tests which are chosen only by students intending to study a particular field — in which they presumably consider themselves competent. Between 1972 and 1987, average scores of students choosing to take the English Literature test (who are overwhelmingly of English-speaking origin and have usually been English majors) declined from 545 to 526, while those on foreign language tests in French, German, and Spanish also tended downwards. The number of students taking tests in language or literary fields also declined precipitously; only one-half of the 1972 number took the English Literature test in 1985; the pool of French language test-takers declined to approximately one-fifth of its previous size. The same trends were evident in other fields heavily weighted toward verbal skills: History, Political Science, and Sociology scores fell off dramatically, as did the number of test-takers. In 1972, 1,354 students took the philosophy test; in 1984, only 252 signed up, and the test was subsequently discontinued.

These apparent declines in verbally oriented fields — even by native English-speaking literature majors — has troubled many observers who feel that a society needs good philosophers, statesmen, and writers as well as outstanding technological minds. In direct contrast, the same years have seen relatively large scoring gains in the fields of engineering, mathematics, psychology, and economies. For example, more students took the engineering test in 1987 than in 1972, and the average score rose from 593 to 623. The number of non-U.S. citizens in these technological fields who will decide to leave the United States after they obtain their advanced training is, of course, unknown.

Let me speculate for just a moment about what these changes might suggest. For reasons which I hope will become clear later in this book, sequential, verbal-analytic reasoning (such as that needed for fluent, accurate reading, writing, and oral language expression) depends on quite different uses of the brain than do skills depending more heavily on nonverbal, "simultaneous" mental processes (e.g., engineering, some aspects of higher mathematics). No clear statement, much less any conclusions, can be drawn from this spotty scenario, but one might be tempted to ponder whether, whatever the reason, we are seeing some sort of shift in abilities — or at least interest — among our future academic leaders.

... and Back in the Trenches

Of course, few of our students make it to graduate school. For the vast majority of American youngsters, declines in math and science achievement as well as in verbal skills are a source of national alarm. Recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have shown particular deficiencies in higher-order reasoning skills, including those necessary for advanced reading comprehension, math, and science. Although younger students, in the wake of a clamor for educational reform, seem to have improved test scores slightly, "most of the progress has occurred in the domain of lower-order skills." Math scores, according to the NAEP findings, are particularly dismal when students are required to sustain attention for problems requiring more than one step. For example, only 44% of high school graduates could compute the change that would be received from $3.00 for two items ordered from a lunch menu.

The same deficiencies in sustained reasoning are found in other subjects. Thus, according to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, only 20% of seventeen-year-olds could write an organized job-application letter, only 4% could make sense out of a sample bus schedule, and only 12% could arrange six common fractions in order of size. Dr. Shanker goes on to comment that only 20 to 25% of students currently in school can learn effectively from traditional methods of teaching.

Particularly troublesome is the fact that, with the exception already noted of foreign-born math students, older and better students are falling behind similar students of previous decades. Eroding abilities in the "best" students first started to show up in the NAEP results in the seventies. A similar trend showed up when a well-recognized test of basic skills for grade school students was revised in 1977. Scores of a nationally representative sample of 40,000 fourth and eighth graders were compared with those of their 1970 counterparts. "Average" fourth graders in 1977 were slightly worse in all areas than fourth graders of 1970, and "language usage" among the better students had dropped significantly. "Average" eighth graders of 1977 had fallen half a year behind those of 1970 both in language usage and mathematics concepts; the "fast" eighth graders had declined most of all. They scored significantly lower in all subjects, with a full-year drop in language usage ability. As will be shown later, the effects of these universally noted trends have begun to show up even in highly selective colleges, as professors find they must water clown both reading and writing assignments as well as expectations for analytic reasoning. Despite a serious effort on the part of elementary and high schools to beef up the curriculum, students of all ability levels show virtually no gains in higher-order skills.

Exhibit A in the current academic crisis is the state of reading abilities. Although declines in reading ability have already raised a loud outcry among educators and employers; most people are not aware either of the breadth of the problem or how the manipulation of test procedures are masking its real dimensions.

Copyright © 1990 by Jane M. Healy

About the Author

is an educational psychologist and teacher who has worked with students from preschool through graduate school. She consults and lectures worldwide, helping teachers and parents understand the educational implications of current brain research. She has appeared on national media such as the Today show, Nightline, Good Morning America, CNN, and NPR. A mother and grandmother, she currently lives in Vail, Colorado.