In Test, Few Students Are Proficient Writers

[Rman]

April 3, 2008
In Test, Few Students Are Proficient Writers
By SAM DILLON
About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.

The test, administered last year, showed that there were modest increases in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar exam was given, in 2002. But the skills of high-performing eighth and 12th graders remained flat or declined.

Girls far outperformed boys in the test, with 41 percent of eighth-grade girls scoring at or above the proficient level, compared with 20 percent of eighth-grade boys.

New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with more than half their students scoring at or above the proficient level (56 percent in New Jersey, 53 percent in Connecticut). Those two and seventeen other states ranked above New York, where 31 percent of students wrote at the proficient level.

Authorities in the federal government’s school testing program said they were encouraged by the results, especially since they seemed to counter other recent indicators suggesting a decline in Americans’ writing abilities.

“I am happy to report, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that the death of writing has been greatly exaggerated,” said Amanda P. Avallone, an eighth-grade English teacher who is a vice chairwoman of the board that oversees the federal testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.

Still, some experts questioned whether the test, which asks students to write brief essays in a short time, gave an accurate measurement of their writing ability.

The results were released at a news conference Thursday at the Library of Congress in Washington.

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about what he called “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence,” because young Americans are doing most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.

“The sentence is the biggest casualty,” Mr. Billington said. “To what extent is students’ writing getting clearer? Is that still being taught?”

Ms. Avallone sought to allay his concerns.

“I know that the sentence has not been put to rest as a unit of communication,” she said.

Ms. Avallone said the differences between girls’ and boys’ scores may result in part from lower literacy expectations for boys in public schools.

“These days I seldom, if ever, hear the message that math and science do not matter for girls, yet I do still encounter the myth that many boys won’t really need to write very much or very well once they leave school,” Ms. Avallone said.

The national writing test was given to 140,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th grade students, selected to form a representative sample of all students nationwide in those grades. Each student wrote two 25-minute essays, designed to measure student skills at writing to inform, persuade and tell stories.

Overall, 33 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level, which the test designers defined as competency in carrying out challenging academic tasks, while 88 percent scored at or above the basic level, defined as partial mastery of the skills needed for proficient work.

While 33 percent of eighth graders writing with proficiency may not sound like a lot, it is the best performance by eighth graders on any subject matter tested in the national assessment program in the last three years. Smaller percentages of eighth-grade students have performed at the proficiency level in reading, math, science, civics or history tests. Only 17 percent of eighth graders managed a proficient score on the nationwide history exam in 2006, for example.

“These results pleased and encouraged me,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s 60 largest urban districts. “A lot of cities have introduced explicit writing programs. You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”

There were large differences in scores from state to state. Mississippi ranked last, with only 15 percent of students writing at the proficiency level.

The encouraging overall results contrasted with some other recent indicators of Americans’ writing prowess. A survey of 120 corporations conducted by the College Board in 2003, for instance, concluded that one-third of employees at the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly, and that businesses were spending billions of dollars on remedial training, some of it for new hires straight out of college.

“Overall, American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, the founder of Concord Review, a journal published in Massachusetts that features history research papers written by high school students. He expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills because, he said, it only tests their ability to write very brief essays jotted out in half an hour.

“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it — and nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly,” he said.

Mr. Fitzhugh cited findings of a 2006 survey of college professors, in which a large majority said they thought most high school graduates came to college with limited writing skills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/education/03cnd-writing.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Eric P]

You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”

is this code for graffiti?

[Robo]

 

[AdmiralViscen]

I'd like to know what "proficient" means, because 90% of my classmates at the college level can't write for shit.

I might be able to post some samples for some laughs.

[Rman]

Agreed.  I worked as a writing tutor in college.  It was not fun.

Post the samples, AV.

[Barry Egan]

This means I'll get along swimmingly with my English degree, right? 

Right?

[MrAngryFace]

term papers were the best. id always write them the night before they were due all hopped up on soda pop and movies.

[Rman]

Yep.  Same here, MAF.  Did anyone actually write their papers more than 2 days before they were due?

[bagofeyes]

most people are ugly too. i hate most people.

[AdmiralViscen]

Here's the email he sent the file with. It's a senior-level e-commerce course where each person is to set up their own small business and share weekly results with the rest of the class. Get a load of this piece of shit.

Student,

my paper, i appreciate all comments, and suggestions. i insist that you
make one in not more

thank you
gl

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5WL09NBX

It's even funnier if you know about cars because it's full of blatantly false and stupid shit.

[MrAngryFace]

Yep.  Same here, MAF.  Did anyone actually write their papers more than 2 days before they were due?

fukin nerds did!

[Phoenix Dark]

haha my highschool adviser was also my highschool english teacher, and I'd always piss her off by telling her I wrote my papers a day before they were due - AFTER she gave me the A of course. And when she made us do rough drafts/peer reviews I'd always bring in a final draft.

English was my easiest subject in HS and college, by far. Posting on message boards has made me lazy but I'm a good writer

[drozmight]

I wrote term papers slowly over the course of a month.

[Joe Molotov]

I wrote term papers slowly over the course of a month.

I worried about term papers slowly over the course of a month. Then actually started writing them the night before they were due.

I had to do this 15 page research paper over Mario Savio once for this BS class that I was just taking for the credits. I waited until 7pm the night before, then went to the library and checked out every book that had references to Mario Savio, scanned through them to get a few quotes to sprinkle generously throughout my paper, then went to Wikipedia to get the basic idea, then basically just made up a bunch of stuff to go in between. A+, baby! Now that's proficient writing.