{"id":263,"date":"2006-05-25T11:10:56","date_gmt":"2006-05-25T11:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/25\/the-scores-are-falling\/"},"modified":"2006-05-25T11:10:56","modified_gmt":"2006-05-25T11:10:56","slug":"the-scores-are-falling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/25\/the-scores-are-falling\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scores Are Falling?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores<\/a>, cited in this morning’s New York Times<\/cite><\/a>. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some thoughts<\/a>, and includes a couple of the questions.)<\/p>\n

The headline-grabbing result is that the twelfth-grade scroes are down over the last ten years, while the fourth-grade scores rose. The educational system of the nation is clearly in free-fall, and we’ll all be speaking Chinese by the end of the decade…<\/p>\n

Or, possibly, there may be a bit less to the story than there appears… (Continued below the fold).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I haven’t read the full report, and I’m not likely to (I have to sit in on a class, meet with a half-dozen students, meet with the committee that makes tenure decisions, attend a colloquium, and somehow squeeze in an hour in the lab so my student can do useful work tomorrow…), but the scores reported in the Times<\/cite> piece don’t really leap out at me as a gigantic criisis. The increase in the fourth-grade scores is about five percentage points in the number of students scoring at the “basic” or “proficient” level (from 63 to 68), while the decrease in the twelfth-grade scores is about three percentage points (from 57 to 54). This is deemed statistically significant, but I’m not terribly worried. <\/p>\n

Also, the decline in scores is only relative to the 1996 numbers– between 2000 and 2005, the scores actually went up slightly, from 52 to 54. So you might just as well say that scores have increased over the last five years, rather than wringing your hands over the last decade’s decrease. Yeah, the increase might not be statistically significant, but saying that three percent is a crisis but two percent is not requires an awfully Manichean view of statistical significance…<\/p>\n

More importantly, this comparison is really between two different groups of students– the twelfth graders of 1996 are not the same people as the twelfth graders of 2005. At least, I devoutly hope that nobody took the twelfth-grade test in 2005 who previously took it in 1996. And given that the test is only administered once every four or five years, it’s impossible to say anything about the quality of the data– maybe the Class of ’96 was just an exceptionally strong bunch, science-wise, while the Class of ’05 are a bunch of laggards. Having taught five different classes freshman physics, I can easily believe that test scores would fluctuate by a couple of percent from one year to the next.<\/p>\n

A better comparison might be to look at the trajectory of one group of students, but unfortunately, the data don’t quite allow that, as 2005’s twelfth graders were third graders in 1996 (unless I’m miscounting), and didn’t take the test. You can get a rough sense of the trajectory, though, by looking at the progress of scores, so the 1996 fourth-grade group (plus or minus a year) goes from 63 to 59 to 54, a drop that could sensibly be attributed to the fact that senior-level questions ought to be harder than fourth-grade-level questions. How do they stack up to their peers? Well, we don’t have full data, but 2000’s fourth-grade class suffered exactly the same drop from 63 to 59 in th move to eighth grade, and the eighth-grade class of 1996 dropped an amazing eight points, from 60 to 52 over their final four years. That doesn’t look like a big change in the quality of education over the last several years.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you’d like to believe this represents a real crisis, and want a way to blame it on George Bush, the Times<\/cite> has got you covered:<\/p>\n

\n

Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading and math required by the No Child Left Behind law. That has led many elementary schools to cancel some science classes. On average, the time devoted to science instruction among elementary teachers across the nation declined from a weekly average of 2.6 hours in 2000 to 2.3 hours in 2004, Department of Education statistics show.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Again, the drop is not terribly impressive– the real scandal here is that science only gets two and a half hours a week. The kids spend more time than that eating lunch, for God’s sake… But if you want something to blame for the arguably-significant drop in scores, NCLB is as good as anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning’s New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some… Continue reading The Scores Are Falling?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}