Professor M. Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham and Professor Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University have published a study of reading and math scores in the United States showing significant increases between 1971 and 2017. During that time, I studied for about a year.

Writing in the journal Education Next based on a recent 87-page article in Educational Psychology Review, two academics found that black, Hispanic, and Asian students improved faster than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. I also discovered that

Some reports on American schools leave a different impression. Shakeel and Peterson cite books such as “The Decline of Intelligence in America” ​​by Seymour Itzkoff in 1994 and “The Dumbest Generation” by Mark Bauerlein in 2008. Those authors argued that young people in America are failing to acquire basic knowledge and skills because of electronic devices and other negative effects. What’s not much of an improvement is the inability of teenagers to offset the hours piled up on screens in their spare time.

Student test scores plummet during pandemic

Shakeel and Peterson suggest that the improvement in academic performance during the half-century they studied was due to higher living standards and better schooling. While that was going on, the research was refining our understanding of how smart we change.

According to two scholars, intelligence as measured by IQ tests was thought to be “a genetically determined constant that only changes over time.” However, in the mid-1980s, New Zealand political scientist James Flynn found that his IQ score increased by 3 points every 10 years. As Shakeel and Peterson state:

The increase in average IQ was accompanied by a reduction in the achievement gap between ethnic and income groups in the United States, they said. and the gap between white students was halved. The increase in black children was greatest in elementary school, persisted in middle school, and decreased through high school.

Shaquille and Peterson argue that “this may be due to educationally beneficial changes in family income, parental education, and family size within the black community.” Other factors may also be at play, including legislation, early interventions such as HeadStart and other preschool programs, and compensatory education for low-income students.”

The difference in average performance between 4th and 8th grade students on the same test is approximately one standard deviation, a common term in statistical analysis. Scholars found that primary school reading skills for white students increased by 9% per decade, compared with 28% per decade for Asian students, 19% per decade for black students, and 19% per decade for Hispanic students. The number of students in the system is increasing by 13%.

“Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds progress faster than their better-advanced peers in elementary and middle school,” scholars said.

They concluded, “Our data relate to 160 intertemporally related math and reading tests administered to a nationally representative sample of a cohort of US students born between 1954 and 2007. It consists of over 7 million student test scores.”

The term “intertemporal link” means that the test was designed to be comparable over time by repeating some of the same questions in different decades or by other techniques. The tests included the U.S. government’s longitudinal check on school performance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and other exams that compare educational outcomes in different countries.

What’s really going on in America’s public schools?

Scholars suggested that mathematics scores improved more than reading in the half-century they studied because of the different rates of change for different types of intelligence. An analysis of 271 studies on IQ published by Martin Voracek finds that fluid reasoning, including mathematics, has outgrown crystallized knowledge, including reading, in the last century. Improved maternal and infant nutritional status and reduced exposure to communicable diseases over the past 100 years may have encouraged fluid inferences.

There are other possible connections between the state of our planet and how we spent our senior years. For example, the loss of learning during the pandemic may be related to factors that caused the global slowdown in intellectual growth during World War II, Shakeel and Peterson said. That massive conflict has resulted in “both the closure of schools and a global disruption of economic and social progress,” they said.

All in all, the last half-century has been largely good for schools, for reasons I don’t know. Shakeel, Peterson, and many other researchers on whom we depend will now have to wait and see how quickly they recover from the educational damage of coronavirus.