Adult Literacy in the United States (2019)
nces.ed.gov
nces.ed.gov
I often observe a variation of literacy which doesn’t seem to get much discussion:- people who are notionally literate and can pass literacy tests, but for whom the objective of reading is not to actually read the words, but to “get the gist” of a paragraph. This might include skimming techniques. It has a relatively high payoff as a reading strategy, because often the gist is all you strictly need.
But when faced with a text where the precise meaning of words and their order actually matters, these people struggle a lot.
My observations are in the context of supporting non-technical people interpret semi-technical material, so there’s a confounding factor of the text discussing a relatively tricky subject matter. But I’ve seen this pattern enough, and drilled down to the resolution often enough, that I am convinced that the core issue is one of literacy and reading skill, not mastery of the subject matter. To use a technical analogy, it feels like the texts are using Real numbers but these people are only reading the nearest Integer.
I have no data but can’t help feel this is somehow related to the death of nuance in discourse.
I've been an avid reader all my life, mostly of fiction novels, but not only.
Over time, as the habits of my work have permeated into my daily life I've found the following:
- I skim over most written text to get to gist of it, even for novels
- as a consequence, I usually lose the nuance and the details of a text, even though I get mostly 80% of the content. I find myself needing to go back when I don't understand why something happens, or a character comes out of nowhere, etc.
The same thing has also filtered to my non-reading habits, for example when listening to people. I quickly switch to getting the gist of what someone is telling me and making up the rest in my mind.
And this has gotten me into trouble several times, even though it is an effective technique most of the time when programming or with similarly related tasks and you research across many tabs and search results and you need to get knowledge quickly without stopping to read everything.
I've tried to slow down myself and really listen until the end when people talk to me, and making a conscious effort to try to remember what they're saying to me, or what I'm reading. This works better.
I also feel that having access to all those helps, reminders, and also search engines, has greatly deteriorated my memory capacity or willingness to store facts, plans, ideas, in my mind, as I know I can retrieve it later if I need it, or I trust tools to remind me of things. I've become more forgetful over time.
Well...at least it is important to be aware to try to fix it.
I'm not from the US, I think it is a global phenomenon for similar cultures.
> I have no data but can’t help feel this is somehow related to the death of nuance in discourse.
It was a largely illiterate society that originally enjoyed the works of Homer and Shakespeare, for instance.
ETA It may be that our society now more sorts into literate and illiterate groups and these groups behave differently, interact differently. In ancient times the same groups existed, perhaps, but couldn't be sorted by literacy.
Were the works of Homer and Shakespeare enjoyed by a significant chunk of the population, or only by the elites at the time?
Skimming is a skill that can be taught as well - in fact, I remember learning different skimming techniques in school. It isn't as useful without being able to parse out exacts when needed, though.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.7129...
I have to wonder how much of it is due to just lazy habits, e.g., when major newspapers are written to a 6th-grade reading level, it's pretty easy to slide into skimming habits.
OTOH, once the texts get seriously detailed, even when well-written, logic ability and skills come to the fore - if you cannot simultaneously hold in your head each the multiple concepts being described, as well as the logical relations being described, you'll have a really hard time understanding the interactions between those concepts.
Research to sort out the difference would be really interesting to see. If it is a lot of just bad skimming habits, seems easy to cure. But fundamental limitations in logical abilities and skills are much harder to address.
Yes, I want folks to be literate, but I also want news to be available to as many people as possible. Having local news at a lower reading level means that younger people can understand the news. Immigrants and others that are learning the language of the area truly benefit. Easy to read news is more easily understood when folks don't have as much mental stamina, too.
Besides, advertisements surely are going to keep to simply language so that more folks understand them. So will various other players. Might as well be sure to give factual things too.
Those of us that want more complex material can find it.
Now I've stopped caring so much, after reading beyond plenty of material from all over the spectrum (including the PIAAC's "Level 5," where the only difference between it and lower levels is that "Level 5" stuff is mostly the authors flexing their mastery over extraneous vocabulary, at the cost of "getting to the point," and succinctly presenting the "meaty core" of whatever it is they're trying to get across).
Long words and sentences do not make for better writing. Sometimes they are warranted, but many times I simply skim over them, because it's clear what the author is trying to say, but he still wishes to self-fellate on how "nuanced" his views are (see: most geopolitical works).
I have yet to come across a work where painstaking precision is warranted. That's not to say precision is unwarranted, but simply that the author hasn't taken any time to distill only the most important parts, and formulate a sufficiently brisk sentence to encapsulate the core of his thoughts (and let the reader's intuition fill in the gaps).
Too much liberty is taken in rambling down winding paths, only to come back the other way, and leave me thinking: "what was the fucking point?"
Most long works written today can be distilled into a pamphlet. And almost anyone who thinks his views are sufficiently nuanced, that they require long and tedious expositions is simply deluding themselves of their own self-importance (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, is an apt example).
Ideas are overrated. If they're self-evident enough that the intuition readily grasps hold of it, it doesn't need 300 pages to convince itself so. It's as if all that cruft is there only to distract you of how shallow the ideas are, and to trick you into thinking "wow, this is long and I'm having a difficult time really wrapping my head around it... surely this knowledge must be so advanced that it's worth the effort!"
Even our classical thinkers suffer from this. Clauswitz's On War could be summarized into a single page; the rest is simply Clauswitz overestimating how much his ideas matter.
Why is that? Is it because they try to speedrun through the test, causing them to miss the important details and doing horribly on the comprehension questions? Or are they not able to decipher the "the precise meaning of words and their order" regardless of time?
As someone who works in literacy, I have seen this cited many times and referenced it several times myself. It was only this year, when I was reading Scout Mindset [1] that I realized this statistic doesn't say what so many people think it does.
People cite this stat to prove how important literacy is. After all, if a student can't read, then he is not going to be able to pass classes in a wide variety of subjects. This notion of causality is captured in the similarly-common saying "first you learn to read, then you read to learn".
But the stat doesn't prove causality at all. And when you step back and think about it, there is likely to be a very large overlap between people who have low reading ability and people who are more likely to drop out of school. This is perhaps obvious to people who do not work in literacy, where we tend to overestimate its importance.
For me, this was a perfect example of confirmation bias, where people — even people who are generally smart and well-meaning — credulously accept (or even tout) statistics without first analyzing them. Had we seen a stat that indicated that reading ability didn't affect educational outcomes, we surely would have dug in and tried to figure out what was wrong with the calculation. But this one sounded right, so now it's part of the accepted wisdom in the world of literacy. This statistic is cited wherever someone is asking for more money to be poured into early literacy programs, as if solving literacy will have this 300% multiplier effect.
I thought about posting about this on LinkedIn, and urging others to try to think about what beliefs are common in their industry, but have not been thoroughly examined. It would be great if we could call out some of these common-but-untrue beliefs, which may lead to misallocation of resources.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinki...
Does it prove that there is no causality?
In twin studies, the goal is to study twins (identical genetic inheritence) either from the same household (similar socioeconomic environment) or separate ones (often foster-parent settings or other forms of adoption), and comparing life trajectories, educational attainment, and employment history. I'm not specifically aware of education-related studies of this form, though I'd strongly recommend literature search (Google Scholar, etc.) on keywords such as "twin studies education".
On test-cutoff studies, there was one I ran across recently in which individuals who tested just at the cutoff of the qualification threshold for advanced academy entrance. That is, students scoring above the threshold attended the schools, those below did not. The findings were of comparable subsequent lifetime attainments (employment, income), suggesting that innate ability was a stronger predictor than educational history. I can't find the study presently, though I'm pretty certain it addressed the Specialised High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_High_Schools_Admis...
Far more studies look at basic demographic or geographic data. To a large extent this constitutes an availability heuristic: the data are far more abundant and more readily available. How predictive they are on a causality basis is harder to determine. One example (turned up whilst searching for the entrance-exam study):
"Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares" (2016) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...
Another school of thought (so to speak) is on what education's impact socially is, at least along economic-performance measures. (There are of course other legitimate outcomes of education, including its roles in culture and democratic institutions.) Such viewpoints often come from the right, though may also be found among more liberal economists. One such, Ha-Joon Chang addresses this in chapter 17 of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, "More education itself is not going to make a country richer" (2010). Dr. Ha-Joon notes that:
1. Many poor countries have high educational attainment.
2. Many rich countries have comparatively low attainment.
3. Numerous countries (particularly in east / southeast Asia) have made remarkable economic progress without especially high educational attainment.
4. Mechanisation has a far greater impact on per-worker productivity than education.
5. Businesses generally prefer de-skilling work in order to make labour more substitutable. This of course reduces the benefits of education.
Additional points (Ha-Joon does not address these directly) are that infrastructure counts for a great deal, and "brain drain" --- economic migration by the more educated --- can siphon off a country's most educated citizens, essentially subsidising the economies of other countries.
See: https://www.worldcat.org/title/twenty-three-things-they-dont...
Among Ha-Joon's more interesting citations:
L. Pritchett, "Where has all the education gone?", The World Bank Economic Review, 2001, vol. 13, no. 3. https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/85982146818027378... (PDF)
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) https://nyupress.org/9780853459408/labor-and-monopoly-capita...
Stephen Marglin, "What do Bosses Do?", published in two parts in The Review of Radical Political Economy, 1974, 1975. https://scholar.harvard.edu/marglin/publications/what-do-bos... https://scholar.harvard.edu/marglin/publications/what-do-bos...
Isn't the SHSAT a test that measures a mix of innate ability and effort expended learning (both in general, and prepping for the SHSAT)?
Rather, it's looking at individuals with all-but-identical scores on the admissions exam, but on either side of the admissions line, one of whom attended a specialised high school, and one of whom did not. The difference in scores is well within the measurement error of the exam itself.
(Caveat: If I'm remembering the study correctly.)
That is: even if test prep is a factor in score, the scores considered were not differentiated, and those meeting or failing the cut-off could have equivalent access to test prep. I don't know whether or not such prep was specifically considered, and would have to track down the study to confirm or deny.
You can pour all the money you want into literacy, and that is fine and a good thing, but it does not address the needs of a child who is not progressing because no one talks to them at home or there are other basic needs not being met.
Is this universally true? Or is it only true for certain socioeconomic classes?
One of the biggest problems in education is the fact that during the summer vacation some students improve while others degrade. The differential is almost completely predictable by socioeconomic class.
Seems to me their post implies all students learn during term time, showing there's nothing wrong with any of them. And anything outside of term time is extracurricular; everyone knows more extracurricular activities need more parental time and money.
The only way for the poor to not be intrinsically less smart than the non-poor would be for there to be little-to-no impact of IQ on job choice.
But of course IQ affects job choice, which affects income, which determines class.
Consider the most common jobs in the upper income decile--physicians, managers, executives, and lawyers. Generally speaking, these jobs are inaccessible to people with average IQs, let alone low IQs. So of course these high-paying jobs are far more likely to be filled by folks with high IQs.
Now, consider the most common jobs in the lowest decile--nursing aides, cashiers, cooks, housekeepers. Jobs like this would be, generally speaking, boring for people with average IQs and absolute torture for folks with high IQs (who as a rule crave novelty and complexity to a greater degree than most). So of course these low-paying jobs are more likely to be filled by folks with low IQs.
This doesn't even get into the fact that ~15% of the population have IQs below 85. These folks will struggle to hold down any job, and are far more likely to sort into the ranks of the poor than into the middle or upper classes.
Ignoring objective truths is always dangerous, even if they are uncomfortable.
The vast majority of pedagogical literature and science from the last couple of decades is talking about the importance of instilling a "growth mindset", depicting a whole zoo of interventions shown to improve cognitive skills in students, including as measured by SAT scores and IQ tests (even if they are imperfect measurement tools).
There is a relatively easy way to disprove your claim if you believe in IQ tests (an assumption I am making). You can improve your test score by practicing on similar tests (or even unrelated things like crosswords). Trivial exercises can improve your IQ test score or any other cognitive measure.
A lot of "underperforming" students actually close some of the gap during the school year. The problem is that during the summer break, the gap reopens even wider for those from lower socioeconomic classes.
This is one of the primary arguments for "year round" school.
Plenty of kids don't even know the alphabet when they start school. It is interesting to compare those parents with my parents who felt that kids who couldn't full-on read and write by about 5 were being failed. Whether a kid will be a competent reader is probably determined by the home environment before school even starts.
It is especially common in certain "sciences" which typically involve a lot of data collection. Followed by attempts to crunch it up into some kind of popular and far reaching conclusions, intended to fool the examiners into awarding a PhD.
The kind of Academic Inflation you're talking about is almost entirely the product of PIs who need to publish, publish, publish to get tenure and funding. The vast majority of people who are awarded PhDs understand they have almost no chance of even landing a tenure track position and consequently have little incentive to fluff up their work.
One outlying example is dyslexics - one can be arbitrarily bright, but have enormous difficulty reading - I've personally known extremely intelligent people who struggled finishing high school because of their poor reading comprehension - this is something that ought to be remedied.
I'd say it's far more likely these students struggle academically - but the problem is that the further they fall behind, the more of an uphill battle for them to keep up with the class, let's say X takes 50% more time to solve a text-based math problem than his peers, but due to his poor reading comprehension he takes again 50% more time just to understand the problem - which might make the difference between failing and passing.
And as lacking as public schooling is, I'd expect them to do their damnedest that people leave school with at least basic reading comprehension after 12 years of education.
A somewhat similar study is the 2016 OECD report (based surveys conducted in 2011--12 and 2014-15, involving 215,942 and at least 5,000 in each country), "Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills"
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...
Jacob Nielsen addressed that in the context of computer UI/UX requirements for general-use application and website design, "The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think":
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
I've referenced both in my own essay, "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", which acknowledges both that general-use systems must be generally-usable, and that this requirement reduces functionality for advanced users by numerous mechanisms. That conflict seems inevitable.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
There is additional research in the field of cognitive development with similar trends (see generally Jean Piaget).
For those interested in a detailed, long-term, large-picture view of the US educational system, see US Department of Education, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (1993):
https://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E... (downloadable PDF)
It's worth noting that in 1900, the high-school graduation rate within the US was 6%, of whom 60% were female. That rose to 76% of 17 year-olds by the 1962-63 school year, and has fluctated around that level since. (Subsequent attainment of a HS diploma or equivalent general education diploma (GED) certificate by age 25 is somewhat higher.)
The upshot from all of this is that literacy and skills of the general population are likely far lower than you would expect, in both technical and nontechnical areas. Whether you're designing UI/UX, writing journalism, running for elective office, or engineering or combatting propaganda, these facts must be taken into consideration. Blind faith that "all the children are above average" will doom plans. Though so too may presumptions that literacy or technical skills are themselves direct measures of intelligence.
Reading ability is an implicit task of basic cognitive functioning like following simple instructions, interpretation, pattern recognition, prioritization, and so forth. It’s frightening how well many children grasp these skills well and how many adults struggle with these on such a very basic level.
For example, in my line of work as a front end developer there is a thing called the DOM, a tree model. Many small children understand tree models and can navigate them with ease, but many (perhaps most) adults cannot do this on even a primitive level and do bizarre things to protect their careers in an effort to learn how to navigate the DOM which only requires a few hours of practice with absolutely no barrier to entry.