Literacy and reading performance in the United States, from 1880 to the present
TL;DR: The authors reviewed literacy and reading achievement trends over the past century and place current debates in a historical perspective, and suggested that students' reading performance at a given age remained stable until the 1970s and much of it can be explained by the changing demographics of test-takers.
Abstract: THE AUTHORS review literacy and reading achievement trends over the past century and place current debates in a historical perspective. Although then-and-now studies are methodologically weak, they suggest that students' reading performance at a given age remained stable until the 1970s. The test score decline that then occurred was not as great as many educators think, and much of it can be explained by the changing demographics of test-takers. The decline pales when compared to the tremendous increase in the population's educational attainment over the past 40 years. However, the strategy of ever-increasing schooling to meet ever-increasing literacy demands may have run its course. High school dropout rates are increasing, and educational attainment has leveled off. Researchers have identified substantial mismatches between workers' skills and job demands, and between job and school literacy skills. In spite of their flaws, functional literacy tests suggest that 20 percent of the adult population, or 30 million people, have serious difficulties with common reading tasks. Upgrading literacy skills now requires new initiatives by coalitions of educators, community groups, employers, and government agencies.
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TL;DR: An overview of the prevalence of poor health literacy skills in America is given and how poor health Literacy affects patients' health care experience is described.
Abstract: Health literacy skills are increasingly important for both health and health care. Unfortunately many patients with the most extensive and complicated health care problems are at greatest risk for misunderstanding their diagnoses medications and instructions on how to take care of their medical problems. Much health promotion and patient education information has traditionally used printed materials written at reading levels at or above the 10th grade. Such material is not accessible to the millions of Americans with inadequate literacy. This paper gives an overview of the prevalence of poor health literacy skills in America and describes how poor health literacy affects their health care experience. (authors)
243 citations
Cites background from "Literacy and reading performance in..."
...Despite increasing education, average reading skills of US adults are only between the eighth and ninth grade levels (Stedman and Kaestle, 1991)....
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TL;DR: From this it follows that there is no special key to reading and writing, no explicit principle to be taught that, once learned, makes the written language transparent to a child who can speak, and Whole Language falls back on a method that encourages children to get from print just enough information to provide a basis for guessing at the gist.
Abstract: Promoters of Whole Language hew to the belief that learning to read and write can be as natural and effortless as learning to perceive and produce speech. From this it follows that there is no special key to reading and writing, no explicit principle to be taught that, once learned, makes the written language transparent to a child who can speak. Lacking such a principle, Whole Language falls back on a method that encourages children to get from print just enough information to provide a basis for guessing at the gist. A very different method, called Code Emphasis, presupposes that learning the spoken language is, indeed, perfectly natural and seemingly effortless, but only because speech is managed, as reading and writing are not, by a biological specialization that automatically spells or parses all the words the child commands. Hence, a child normally learns to use words without ever becoming explicitly aware that each one is formed by the consonants and vowels that an alphabet represents. Yet it is exactly this awareness that must be taught if the child is to grasp the alphabetic principle and so understand how the artifacts of an alphabet transcribe the natural units of language. There is evidene that preliterate children do not, in fact, have much of this awareness; that the amount they do have predicts their reading achievement; that the awareness can be taught; and that the relative difficulty of learning it that some childen have may be a reflection of a weakness in the phonological component of their natural capacity for language.
240 citations
Cites background from "Literacy and reading performance in..."
...Various studies have estimated the number of children who fail at reading to be 20-25 percent of the school population (Stedman and Kaestle 1987)....
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TL;DR: Using the health belief model, the association between inadequate health literacy skills and low rates of colorectal cancer screening is examined and insights into strategies for improving knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs and screening rates for this challenging patient population are provided.
Abstract: Colorectal cancer is ideally suited for early detection strategies that are likely to improve survival rates. Screening with either a fecal occult blood test (FOBT) or flexible sigmoidoscopy has be...
204 citations
Cites background from "Literacy and reading performance in..."
...Even though the average American has more than 12 years of education, the average reading level is approximately eighth to ninth grade (40,41)....
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TL;DR: Lower literacy and minority status are important determinants of understanding consent information, regardless of literacy or language barriers using a modified consent process.
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Little is known about patient characteristics associated with comprehension of consent information, and whether modifications to the consent process can promote understanding. OBJECTIVE: To describe a modified research consent process, and determine whether literacy and demographic characteristics are associated with understanding consent information. DESIGN: Descriptive study of a modified consent process: consent form (written at a sixth-grade level) read to participants, combined with 7 comprehension questions and targeted education, repeated until comprehension achieved (teach-to-goal). PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred and four ethnically diverse subjects, aged ≥50, consenting for a trial to improve the forms used for advance directives. MEASUREMENTS: Number of passes through the consent process required to achieve complete comprehension. Literacy assessed in English and Spanish with the Short Form Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (scores 0 to 36). RESULTS: Participants had a mean age of 61 years and 40% had limited literacy (s-TOHFLA .05). After the second pass, most subjects (80%) answered all questions correctly. With a teach-to-goal strategy, 98% of participants who engaged in the consent process achieved complete comprehension. CONCLUSIONS: Lower literacy and minority status are important determinants of understanding consent information. Using a modified consent process, little additional education was required to achieve complete comprehension, regardless of literacy or language barriers.
195 citations
TL;DR: This paper found that the work-related skills of the labor force do not match the requirements of jobs and that this explains a large part of the growth of wage inequality in the United States in the past 20 years.
Abstract: ▪ Abstract Researchers across a wide range of fields, policy makers, and large segments of the public believe that the work-related skills of the labor force do not match the requirements of jobs and that this explains a large part of the growth of wage inequality in the United States in the past 20 years. Opinions are divided on whether the trend is driven by workforce developments, such as an absolute decline or declining growth of human capital due to changes in educational attainment or test scores, or employer-side changes, such as accelerating growth of job skill requirements due to the spread of computers and employee involvement techniques. Some believe the problem has grown worse over time. However, the evidence is often more ambiguous and fragmentary than recognized, and the argument overlooks the roles of institutional changes and management's policies toward labor in workers' changing fortunes. Evidence suggests that the growth in educational attainment has decelerated, cognitive skill levels ...
171 citations
Cites background from "Literacy and reading performance in..."
...…to large, representative samples in the 1970s and early 1980s concluded that approximately 20% of the adult population at that time had serious difficulties with common reading tasks and another 10% had better but still marginal functional literacy skills (Stedman & Kaestle 1991, p. 109)....
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...…through daily experience, learning from others, and participation in a community of practice and may be tacit rather than easily expressed as formal propositions (Stasz 2001; Scribner 1986; Ceci & Liker 1986; Schooler 1998, p. 70; Sticht 1992; Stedman & Kaestle 1991; see also Hunt 1995, p. 67, 93)....
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...…only probabilistic indicators of actual performance, and there is significant variation and dispute over which probability thresholds to use in mapping scores into categories of cognitive performance (Campbell et al. 2000, p. 93; Sherman et al. 1998, p. 28; Stedman & Kaestle 1991; Mathews 2001)....
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...…before Congress that approximately 50% of adults were not “proficient in meeting the educational requirements of every day adult life” (quoted in Stedman & Kaestle 1991, p.75), although even if this were true, it would apply mostly to people who completed their education prior to the…...
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References
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Book•
01 Jul 1983TL;DR: In this article, the piedmont: textile mills and times of change, and the teaching of how to talk in Trackton and Roadville, are discussed, as well as the teachers as learners and the townspeople.
Abstract: Photographs, maps, figures, tables, texts Acknowledgments Prologue Note on transcriptions Part I. Ethnographer Learning: 1. The piedmont: textile mills and times of change 2. 'Gettin' on' in two communities 3. Learning how to talk in Trackton 4. Teaching how to talk in Roadville 5. Oral traditions 6. Literate traditions 7. The townspeople Part II. Ethnographer Doing: 8. Teachers as learners 9. Learners as ethnographers Epilogue Epilogue - 1996 Notes Bibliography Index.
4,564 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the piedmont: textile mills and times of change, and the teaching of how to talk in Trackton and Roadville, are discussed, as well as the teachers as learners and the townspeople.
Abstract: Photographs, maps, figures, tables, texts Acknowledgments Prologue Note on transcriptions Part I. Ethnographer Learning: 1. The piedmont: textile mills and times of change 2. 'Gettin' on' in two communities 3. Learning how to talk in Trackton 4. Teaching how to talk in Roadville 5. Oral traditions 6. Literate traditions 7. The townspeople Part II. Ethnographer Doing: 8. Teachers as learners 9. Learners as ethnographers Epilogue Epilogue - 1996 Notes Bibliography Index.
4,208 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: The Mismeasure of man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits, and yet the idea of innate limits-of biology as destiny-dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould.
Abstract: When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits-of biology as destiny-dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."
3,879 citations
Book•
16 Nov 1972
TL;DR: Most Americans say they believe in equality. But when pressed to explain what they mean by this, their definitions are usually full of contradictions as mentioned in this paper. But most Americans also believe that some people are more competent than others, and that this will always be so, no matter how much we reform society.
Abstract: Most Americans say they believe in equality. But when pressed to explain what they mean by this, their definitions are usually full of contradictions. Many will say, like the Founding Fathers, that “all men are created equal.” Many will also say that all men are equal “before God,” and that they are, or at least ought to be, equal in the eyes of the law. But most Americans also believe that some people are more competent than others, and that this will always be so, no matter how much we reform society. Many also believe that competence should be rewarded by success, while incompetence should be punished by failure. They have no commitment to ensuring that everyone’s job is equally desirable, that everyone exercises the same amount of political power, or that everyone receives the same income.
2,315 citations