July 20, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1992 Vol. 1 No. 3
EdPress Winner
Technology, Falling SAT Scores, and the Transformation of Consciousness
Your teenager can program your VCR for you. But he can't get an acceptable SAT verbal score to be admitted to the college of his choice. Sound familiar? These are just two manifestations of a new generation gap, one that owes its existence to the swift technological advances of this century. But Jerry Bracey's not surprised. He predicts even lower SAT verbal scores than those of recent years, unless we amend our definition of literacy to include icons and images rather than just printed words.
A prediction: Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) verbal scores will continue to fall.
An assertion: It won't matter.
Yet another assertion: Our current definition of “literacy” is inadequate.
And finally: What we are seeing in lower SAT verbal scores is not the decline and fall of American education but yet another technology-induced transformation of consciousness. The technologies involved this time are multimedia, hypermedia integrated learning systems.
Laboring Toward an Explanation
The fall of average SAT scores has been front page news since the report of a panel headed by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz that studied the decline that had taken place between 1963 and 1977.* The Wirtz panel attributed about three-fourths of the decline up to 1970 to changes in the demographics of who was taking the test, then found dozens of reasons for the later decline: television, family breakup, Watergate, Vietnam—generally what it termed a “decade of distraction.”
(*See On Further Examination: Report of the Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline, Willard Wirtz, Chairman of the Panel, published by The College Entrance Examination Board, New York, 1977.)
I have argued elsewhere that the more recent decline has been caused largely by continuing changes in who is taking the test. The average scores on the SAT were set at 500 using an elite group of all-white, mostly male students in the Northeast. As the baby boom passed, colleges switched from selecting students to recruiting them and now are digging ever more deeply into the talent pool. While the number of high school seniors has declined every year since 1977, college enrollment has risen from 11 million to 14 million. Women, who average about 40 points lower than men on the math section, now make up 52 percent of white test takers, and a substantial portion of test takers come from low-income families. In addition, minority students now make up 28 percent of the test takers.
I am convinced, however, that there is something more at work in the decline of the SAT verbal scores than just demographic shifts. The percent of students scoring above 600 on the SAT verbal also fell in the mid-seventies from 11.4 to 7.2 percent. Since the number of test takers has remained virtually constant, this fall cannot be the result of adding more students at the low end of the scale. Moreover, scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests corroborate the SAT results: The percentage of students scoring high on NAEP reading has also declined somewhat.
The lay public, abetted, even led by the media, have taken the SAT decline as an indictment of schools. I have even seen it written that the decline constitutes a threat to civilization as we know it. When the SAT was introduced in 1926, its developers ascribed modest goals for it, given the difficulty of predicting anything about human beings. In the years since, it has somehow evolved into a platinum rod, the immutable standard by which schools are evaluated. This is foolish, even dangerous.
Moreover, analysts have generally ignored the fact that SAT math scores have fallen little at all. Most of the decline is in the verbal section. Looking at only the aggregate averages, the verbal score has fallen three times as far as the math score. If the schools are at fault for declining SAT scores, is it likely that mathematics, considered by many the worst-taught subject in education, is holding up while reading skills scores decline? After all, the international studies of psychology professors Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan and James Stigler of UCLA find that in comparison to Asian teachers, American teachers spend much more time teaching reading than teaching math.
A New Generation Gap
A comment by Boston Globe syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman provides the major clue to what's up here. During the period when virtually every columnist in the nation was fulminating over the movie JFK, Goodman observed that their howls of anguish were simply attempts by a generation that reads and writes to reach a generation that watches and rewinds.
But, of course, there is more to it than just videotape. We are moving toward a more iconic, oral society of which videotape is only one prominent feature. Consider the following scenario, one that I have enhanced somewhat from its original appearance in an article by Teka Perry published in the November 1987 issue of IEEE Spectrum.
- To help plan a trip to France, you rent an optical disc from your travel agent. When you drop it into your home hypermedia system, which links your computer with your stereo and television, a map of France appears on the TV screen. Using the remote, you highlight Alsace and a video begins. Spotting an imposing castle, you freeze the video and choose between text and auditory descriptions of the castle and its history. Noting that the castle contains a painting of some interest, you stop the text and another video begins, wherein an official of the Louvre explains the nature and significance of the painting. Continuing, you highlight the name of the town nearest the castle and also obtain information about a summer festival there. An audio track plays music from last year's program. What about other festivals? You get that too, then select information about various hotels and restaurants in the areas. After planning your itinerary and booking your reservations, you will use the same disc to decide what clothing and accessories you will pack, review road maps and plan your auto route. While examining restaurants, you begin to worry about the state of your menu-reading skills, and use the audio and video to brush up on some basic conversational French.
What's
wrong with this picture? Only that the travel agent mentioned in the beginning
is likely superfluous. You would probably get your information by connecting
to some on-line data bases rather than doing something so antiquated as stopping
off at a travel agency. With digital tape, laser discs, and high definition
television, you might even find everything so real, thorough, and satisfying,
that you decide an actual trip would be an expensive anticlimax. Given the
current state of technologies, this would leave you unable to experience choucroute
garni, gewürztraminer, and other Alsatian culinary delights,
but no doubt your local wine merchant has both domestic and Alsatian gewurz-es
and another of your data bases contains a microwave recipe for sauerkraut
and sausage. The point is that linking into a hypermedia production is quite
different from curling up with a Guide Michelin or Europe on $3,000.00
a Day.
What's really wrong with this picture is that the disc described represents only a modest application of existing technologies. The range of what writer George Gilder, author of Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life (Norton, 1992), calls “the telecosm” has not yet been deeply plumbed. By way of other examples, though, the Smithsonian Institution has linked up with the National Gallery of Art to provide hypermedia discussions of the Gallery's collection. The National Geographic Society has produced GTV, a hypermedia package to teach geography and history in the United States.
Eighth graders at Exeter/West Greenwich High School in Greenwich, Rhode Island, used hypermedia to produce “The Search for the Titanic,” which includes text, stills, videotapes, and excerpts from the movies Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and A Night To Remember. This hypermedia system explains to other students what the world was like at the time of the Titanic and what submarine technology was needed to find it after it sank. Their project also included a visit to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to interview—and videotape—senior scientist Robert Ballard, the man who directed the expeditions that located the Titanic.
I have not visited Exeter/West Greenwich, but I have viewed tapes of the project and talked by phone with the students and their teachers. While the teachers may have gotten more out of it than the kids, it would be hard for me to say that the students' multimedia, hypermedia experience was any less intellectually rich and deep than it would have been had their activities been limited to the printed word. But since the SAT is predicated on the symbols of books, the Exeter students' scores may be in jeopardy.
Democratic Definitions
The question, therefore, that these multimedia efforts raise is, “What is literacy?” In their thoughtful book Literacy in the United States (Yale University Press, 1991), Carl Kaestle and his colleagues define literacy as “the ability to decode and comprehend written language at a rudimentary level—that is, the ability to say written words corresponding to ordinary oral discourse and to understand them.” As hypermedia and multimedia experiences become more common, will such a definition lose much of its potency, adequacy, even meaning?
We should take a moment here to explain two terms: hypermedia and multimedia. The latter simply means the incorporation of text, pictures, and sound into a single presentation. Hypermedia is an extension of “hypertext,” a word invented in the sixties to describe nonlinear text. Computerized hypermedia applications such as Hypercard for the Macintosh and Linkway for IBM and compatibles allow the filing and retrieval of items in nonlinear fashion.
Those
who grew up on books that had beginnings, middles, and ends and movies that
presented storylines in linear fashion sometimes have trouble adapting to
nonlinear modes, although the success of director David Lynch's movies and
others suggests we find such modes pleasant.
Hypermedia, multimedia, interactive videodiscs, synthesizers of various sorts, virtual reality, and other computer games are not just replacements for books; they are technologies that will alter qualitatively and perhaps fundamentally the nature of consciousness. Can democracy survive?
I do not ask this question flippantly. Some people have argued that the written word is essential to independent thinking and dissent. Others, however, have argued that writing is more often used to assimilate and to induce conformity. Still others point to the accomplishments of pre-literate Greece as definitive proof that literacy is not necessary for societal success or sophistication. In fact, Socrates, an illiterate, argued against mass literacy on the grounds that it would destroy memory. He was right, of course, but did society suffer because of it? Sometimes when I mention Socrates in this way, someone will say, “Yes, but you wouldn't know that, if Plato hadn't written it all down.” Maybe, maybe not. If Socrates had won the day, maybe Gutenberg would have invented the Victrola. In any case, the intellectual progress of mankind seems to be characterized by developing technologies to get stuff out of individual intellects and into external, publicly accessible places.
The Greek experience argues against reading as necessary for thinking. So do self-descriptions people provide. Einstein said he seldom thought in words. An artist friend of mine claims that he thinks mostly in images. I cannot verify this, of course, but conversation with him takes some practice. It has less of the usual flow because it often takes him some time to find the words to describe his images. When he does find the words, they are usually colorful and vivid, which would seem to provide evidence for his contention.
Psychologists Jean Piaget in Switzerland and Jerome Bruner, then at Harvard, engaged in a drawn-out battle over whether language causes changes in thinking in the developing child or whether the changes in thinking come first. Piaget argued thinking. Today, most people would agree with him. In some engineering work, a picture is not only worth a thousand words, it is worth an infinite number of words because no number of words can adequately describe the situation. It must be viewed on video or computer simulation to be understood.
Currently, though, universal literacy is the holy grail in this country. Reading researcher Frank Smith, who lives in British Columbia, called attention to this religiosity in a January 1989 Phi Delta Kappan article: “Let me stress at the outset that I'm in favor of literacy. I think that people who don't read and write miss something in their lives. But I think the same about anyone who doesn't appreciate some form of music. Nevertheless, people who aren't musical aren't usually regarded as failures or social outcasts. They are not blamed for poverty and unemployment. I don't see buttons or bumper stickers saying ‘stamp out unmusicality,’ and I don't hear lack of musical ability referred to as a national disgrace. Furthermore, I don't think music would be helped much if war were declared on tone deafness. But…literacy is promoted as the source of just about everything good in this world, and illiteracy is cited as the cause of widespread evil.”
Judging by some reactions I heard to Smith's article, it's a good thing he already lives in Canada.
Shifting into Another Cycle
In a multimedia society, literacy defined solely in terms of reading may cease to be meaningful. We need a view of literacy that incorporates our new technologies and incorporates a broader examination of what is happening in the larger society. I have read reports, for example, of children learning to play complex computer games that require a great deal of imagination. When interviewed, these children are found to have constructed, with little effort, a geometry and mental space that is different from what adults have and which most of us adults find very difficult to imagine.
Still, all these multimedia experiences, rich though they may be, do not provide as much time for reading printed symbols as does a book. Thus, it may well be that SAT verbal scores and other indicators of “literacy” will continue to fall, but, rather than signaling the collapse of the nation, it may simply be a small sign of a paradigm shift. It is in the nature of paradigms, though, that people living in the old one have difficulty seeing the new one and vehemently reject it when at last they can. I would say that the current alarums over the state of verbal skills in this country may be coming from those who will lose control, unable to function in the new paradigm.
So, if upcoming generations lack appreciation for a well-turned phrase or a beautifully crafted paragraph or the near-perfect metaphor, I, like Smith, will feel that they are missing something. At the same time, I will recall that as students my generation took the infliction of Silas Marner on us as strong evidence that teachers hated kids. And, just as I felt sorry for my parents' generation, which had little appreciation for some authors I loved, I expect my grandchildren to feel a pang of sympathy for me as I sit down to watch a golden oldie linear movie while they suit up for some new adventure in virtual reality.
There seems to be a cycle about these things, doesn't there?
Illustrations by Dave Coverly.
Gerald Bracey is a research psychologist and education consultant who writes regular columns for Phi Delta Kappan and Electronic Learning magazines. Bracey has served as associate director of the Institute for Child Study at Indiana University in Bloomington; director of research and evaluation at Cherry Creek School District in Englewood, Colorado; and director of research, evaluation, and testing for the Virginia Department of Education. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
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