Over at Inside Higher Ed, there’s an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so:
[…] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our heads, since in many cases what we are really doing is contrasting our students’ experiences with our experiences in school. By that I mean, our expectations are pretty out of whack if we expect our students to be the kind of students we once were, because once upon a time we were the kind of students who went on to graduate school and became scholars in a particular discipline. Most of our college classmates didn’t. And that’s who most of our students are. And quite a few other folks besides.
This is an excellent point. I have very little direct knowledge of how my college classmates wrote, but the little that I do have more or less agrees with this– I did a group paper for one class in my senior year, and after a quick glance at the drafts the rest of my group had, I immediately volunteered to be the one to collect and compile them, and incidentally clean up the really egregious errors. And if I could spot the grammar errors, serial comma abuser that I am, you know it was bad…
Musgrove goes on to cite a couple of empirical studies of student writing, that claim to see no change in the frequency of errors between older writing samples and more recent ones. The studies are rather old, though, and sort of mechanical– the errors are evaluated “using an error analysis technique derived from a grammar handbook commonly used in college writing courses.” In the comments, people rightly jump on this as being a little dodgy.
Of course, the right experiment to do is obvious: what you need is to pull together a random sample of student writing from ten or twenty years ago, and a sample from more recent years, and do a blind test with some faculty volunteers. Have the same professors grade papers from both groups, and see if the older works get better grades.
It’s probably just about feasible, too, given how infrequently most academics throw things out. There must be some professors around who have twenty-year-old term papers mouldering in a file drawer that could serve as a sample…
10 years ago is about when I was grading lab reports for engineering physics classes. They were awful. No one expects scientists or engineers to write like Faulkner, but a basic grasp of sentence and paragraph structure is not too much to ask.
Two months ago I co-wrote a few paragraphs for a proposal with a work colleague. It was awful. She got lost in the middle of her sentences and the predicates didn’t even match the subjects. I couldn’t believe it. I am fairly certain that this woman has an advanced degree, and the fact that she was hired means my bosses think she is pretty good. So this is an above average, native English speaker who can’t write a coherent paragraph to save her life.
All anecdotes, I know. I was also stunned to see that current verbal GRE scores are abysmally low, and that is not anecdotal data. What do they teach people in high school these days?
BTW, I am sure you intended this, but the old and new papers in your thought experiment should be either double-blinded or mixed together.
McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer (1836, revised 1879). How deeply must you be diversity-inserted into 21st century higher education before “eclectic” is Officially part of your vocabulary? Truth is FOB the moment. American zero-goal education is patriotism; literacy is treason. “Re-Elect the President,” Nixon.
There is a casebook: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” “…by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now”
American class structure is tripartite – income and dialect. Income is Welfare, redistribution, and wealth. Dialect is Spanglish-Ebonics, Technish, and political jabber. Mathematics and science are racist because there are predetermined correct anwers. Empower your students or be litigated for hate langusge.
If our students isn’t learning, may be they was never learning.
I’m more saddened by the degree to which students don’t know basic math. The concept of a variable they think they understand, but they’re not comforatable with it. They aren’t comfortable with very basic algebra– the kind of algebra that my sister the sixth grade teacher spends a lot of time on. (Distance/rate/time problems, for instance.)
I have long suspected that the #1 thing that most kids learn in school is how to get the grades they want to get in school. We certainly see this in college. Some kids are interested in what you are teaching, but more are interested in what they need to “know for the test.” In lab, they are more interested in figuring out what they have to do than understanding the whys and wherefores of what the lab’s all about. Given these pressures, and given that we’re all judged by our student evaluations, we all do, to some degree or another, give the students what they want. To get them to learn, we generally have to subvert them into learning– make it necessary to learn something to pass the test, for instance. It’s tougher than one would think to do that. It’s much easier to write an exam that tests recall of facts (which can be memorized by rote with zero understanding) and recall of problem-solving procedures (likewise).
Knowing how hard it is, and knowing the degree to which high school and earlier education is becoming more and more focused on test scores, it’s no wonder to me that students primarily learn how to get by and how to appear that they are doing well. I’d much rather they learned how to do and understand things, but survival coupled with what the system is telling everybody we value puts different pressures on all of us.
-Rob the Bitter
I’m just happy when by the end of the term I’ve gotten a stack of lab reports with no internet slang. Nothing drives me more crazy than getting lab reports talking about “ppl”, telling “u” to do things and trying to convince me that their results are “gr8”.
My daughter is in high school, and I have a pretty good idea of what they are teaching. The curriculum is driven by the standardized testing to which the students are subjected year after year after year. They are formally taught grammar–label this, underline that, circle that–exercises which have NEVER been shown to have an effect on actual writing. What improves writing: extensive reading and writing improves writing. Nothing else has ever been shown to bring about consistent and significant improvement in writing. Ironically, then, as my daughter spends all this time on grammar, she is not developing as a writer, only as a student who may perform a bit better on the scantron tests that ask whether a given verb should be ‘is’ or ‘are’. The time that could have been devoted to writing is eaten up with useless drill. By the way, I teach grammar to prospective teachers. I can’t tell you the number of times my daughter comes home and describes a grammar exercise that I have just described as ineffective in my grammar class.
I’d hypothesize that the reason Verbal GRE scores are systematically declining is directly connected to the need to maximize teaching to the lowest common denominator for the purpose of raising the greatest possible number of students up to some desired level on primary-ed standardized testing. This “assumption” made, there are then two logical extrapolations from that: Firstly, that the energy and time needed to educate those students capable and desirous of more advanced material will be sacrificed for the sake of the students who need to be brought up to the LCD level, leading to later (and/or less effective) acquisition of advanced verbal skills in those with the aptitude and talent for them; and secondly, since these standardized tests are principle determinants on whether one is admitted to higher-learning institutions there may be more and more students who were raised up to the LCD class, muddled their way through college, and test for the GRE without having much real aptitude or ability.
Disclaimer: IANA Teacher, Parent, Test-maker, or Politician. Especially the last.
Uncle Al, you do know what FOB means? Fresh of the Boath…