Read Online The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
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In 2005, 15- to 24-year-olds came in at around eight minutes on weekdays, nine minutes on weekends, while the overall average was 20 minutes on weekdays and 27 minutes on weekends.
The youngest age group in ATUS, 15- to 24-year-olds, covers people in high school and high school dropouts, college students and college graduates, those who never enrolled in college and those who dropped out. The category thereby mixes individuals of wholly different circumstances. To a 24-year-old, a 16-year-old lives in another universe entirely, whereas a 43-year-old regards a 36-year-old’s world as pretty much the same as his own. Fortunately, other surveys provide more tailored reading numbers for the younger ages, and in recent years they have revealed deeper and darker intellectual profiles of the rising generation.
One report compiled National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data on reading for the last few decades to chart long-term trends in academic performance and contexts. Entitled NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress: Three Decades of Performance in Reading and Mathematics, the study reviewed 36 years of the existence of NAEP to measure academic scores and track them through various demographic groupings and out-of-school experiences. NAEP is best known for the annual test scores it publishes, and those results have assumed crucial significance for schools and teachers in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whose legislation ties funding to what is termed Adequate Yearly Progress, which is measured by test scores. But another aspect of NAEP included in the report examines “Contextual Factors Associated with Reading,” one of them being “reading for fun.” At each extreme, an astonishing shift took place. The percentage of 17-year-olds who “Never or hardly ever” read for fun more than doubled from 1984 to 2004, 9 percent to 19 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of 17-year-olds who read for fun “Almost every day” dropped by 9 points. Nearly half of high school seniors (48 percent) read for fun “once or twice a month or less.”
The numbers mark an elemental turn in youth literacy, and it can’t be accounted for by more reading in class. A few pages earlier, the report charted homework by pages assigned. The percentage of students who had to complete more than 20 pages per day went from 21 percent to 23 percent from 1984 to 2004, and those assigned 16 to 20 pages jumped only one point (14 to 15 percent). Neither figure comes close to matching the leisure reading slump.
While leisure reading doesn’t reflect in-class reading trends, it may bear directly upon reading comprehension scores. Despite all the attention showered upon reading skills ever since the landmark report A Nation at Risk and the rise of the standards movement in the 1980s, reading comprehension scores for high school seniors haven’t budged. Fourth-graders show significant improvement and eighth-graders display some progress as well, but through middle school the gains taper off, and by the end of high school the trend flattens. This is an unfortunate pattern, and it calls out for investigation. Indeed, another large longitudinal survey, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research’s Changing Times of American Youth: 1981-2003, unveils the same pattern. The questionnaire asked about leisure reading for 6- to 17-year-olds, and a disappointing number came up for 2002-03: only 1 hour and 17 minutes per week. There was an optimistic sign, we should note, because that total beat the 1981-82 total by eight minutes. The optimism disappears, however, when the group is broken down by age. On an average weekend day, while six- to eight-year-olds jumped from 9 to 14 minutes, 9- to 11-year-olds from 10 to 15 minutes, and 12- to 14-year-olds from 10 to 13 minutes, 15- to 17-year-olds reversed the gains entirely, dropping from 18 to 7 minutes.
The NAEP Trends 2004
The youngest age group in ATUS, 15- to 24-year-olds, covers people in high school and high school dropouts, college students and college graduates, those who never enrolled in college and those who dropped out. The category thereby mixes individuals of wholly different circumstances. To a 24-year-old, a 16-year-old lives in another universe entirely, whereas a 43-year-old regards a 36-year-old’s world as pretty much the same as his own. Fortunately, other surveys provide more tailored reading numbers for the younger ages, and in recent years they have revealed deeper and darker intellectual profiles of the rising generation.
One report compiled National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data on reading for the last few decades to chart long-term trends in academic performance and contexts. Entitled NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress: Three Decades of Performance in Reading and Mathematics, the study reviewed 36 years of the existence of NAEP to measure academic scores and track them through various demographic groupings and out-of-school experiences. NAEP is best known for the annual test scores it publishes, and those results have assumed crucial significance for schools and teachers in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whose legislation ties funding to what is termed Adequate Yearly Progress, which is measured by test scores. But another aspect of NAEP included in the report examines “Contextual Factors Associated with Reading,” one of them being “reading for fun.” At each extreme, an astonishing shift took place. The percentage of 17-year-olds who “Never or hardly ever” read for fun more than doubled from 1984 to 2004, 9 percent to 19 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of 17-year-olds who read for fun “Almost every day” dropped by 9 points. Nearly half of high school seniors (48 percent) read for fun “once or twice a month or less.”
The numbers mark an elemental turn in youth literacy, and it can’t be accounted for by more reading in class. A few pages earlier, the report charted homework by pages assigned. The percentage of students who had to complete more than 20 pages per day went from 21 percent to 23 percent from 1984 to 2004, and those assigned 16 to 20 pages jumped only one point (14 to 15 percent). Neither figure comes close to matching the leisure reading slump.
While leisure reading doesn’t reflect in-class reading trends, it may bear directly upon reading comprehension scores. Despite all the attention showered upon reading skills ever since the landmark report A Nation at Risk and the rise of the standards movement in the 1980s, reading comprehension scores for high school seniors haven’t budged. Fourth-graders show significant improvement and eighth-graders display some progress as well, but through middle school the gains taper off, and by the end of high school the trend flattens. This is an unfortunate pattern, and it calls out for investigation. Indeed, another large longitudinal survey, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research’s Changing Times of American Youth: 1981-2003, unveils the same pattern. The questionnaire asked about leisure reading for 6- to 17-year-olds, and a disappointing number came up for 2002-03: only 1 hour and 17 minutes per week. There was an optimistic sign, we should note, because that total beat the 1981-82 total by eight minutes. The optimism disappears, however, when the group is broken down by age. On an average weekend day, while six- to eight-year-olds jumped from 9 to 14 minutes, 9- to 11-year-olds from 10 to 15 minutes, and 12- to 14-year-olds from 10 to 13 minutes, 15- to 17-year-olds reversed the gains entirely, dropping from 18 to 7 minutes.
The NAEP Trends 2004
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