SAT scores & the first grade reader

From Jeanne Chall's The Academic Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom?

Changes in Textbook Difficulty

Historical analyses of textbooks show a steady decline in difficulty from the 1920s to the present. The first decline in difficulty was in the reading textbooks for the primary grades. The authors and publishers who were first to simplify the primary reading textbooks claimed that the easier books were more suitable for most children according to research on their vocabulary knowledge (Chall, 1958). The move toward ease was prompted, also, by the change in methods of teaching beginners to a whole-word, sight method from a stronger phonics emphasis. This change made it harder for the children to recognize new words. Hence, the number of new words to be learned in the reading textbooks was lowered. The easier books were soon considered the better books, and, probably because of competition among publishers, the new editions of the primary readers had fewer different words—that is, they were easier than the earlier editions.

By the late 1930s, however, most of the readers had fewer words than the research evidence indicated was optimal (Chall, 1958). Even so, the readers kept getting easier until about the 1960s when some started appearing to get somewhat harder again (Chall, 1958, 1983a).

Subject matter textbooks also became easier from about the 1940s to the 1970s. In a study commissioned by the Advisory Panel on the SAT Score Decline (Chall, Conard, & Harris, 1977), the most widely used textbooks (readers, grammars, composition and history books) published from the 1940s to the 1970s for grades 1, 6, and 11 were found to be increasingly less challenging. When the difficulty of the textbooks was compared to the SAT scores of students who had used them, compelling evidence was found that those students who had used the more difficult textbooks had the higher SAT scores. This was particularly so for the early reading textbooks. The students who had learned from the harder school readers had higher SAT scores, while those who received instruction from easier readers scored lower.

The Academic Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? by Jeanne Chall
p. 50-51

in a nutshell

• SAT verbal scores declined 60 points between the years 1964 and 1980; in 1995 the CollegeBoard recentered the scores
  

• textbook difficulty declined from the 1920s to 2000
  

• early readers were simplified because children who've been taught to sight-read can read far fewer words than children who've been taught to decode text using sound-letter correspondences, or phonics
  

• "students who had used the more difficult textbooks had the higher SAT scores. This was particularly so for the early reading textbooks. The students who had learned from the harder school readers had higher SAT scores, while those who received instruction from easier readers scored lower."

Take-home lesson: teach your children to read.


perfect 1600

Until today, I had never heard of the SAT study.

I had read Tom Fischgrund's book about kids who scored perfect 1800s, however. He found something analogous:

[S]tudents who ace the SAT read an average of fourteen hours a week. Average score students, on the other hand, read only eight hours a week—an immense drop-off. The biggest difference, however, was found in the amount of time students spent reading for school. Average score students spent four hours a week reading literature, textbooks, and other assigned reading for school. Perfect score students put in nine hours a week for school-assigned reading, more than double the amount of time.

[snip]

What do 1600 students read for fun?...The book most frequently mentioned—by a total of 6 percent of perfect score students—was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

The Perfect 1600 Score: The 7 Secrets of Acing the SAT
Tom Fischgrund

I'm thinking the 21st century re-definition of "literacy" does not bode well for the SAT scores of today's Kindergarten.





The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies (approved by the board!)
Some sound reading advice
Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores (pdf file)
Summer homework
SAT I score equivalents