*** Welcome to piglix ***

Math–verbal achievement gap


The math–verbal achievement gap is a phenomenon first observed by Richard Rothstein in a brief 2002 article written in The New York Times. This achievement gap reveals a growing disparity in the United States between the rising national average on the math portions of the college entry SAT and ACT exams, as opposed to the flat-lining verbal portions on the same tests.

Around 1990 the national average on the math portion of the SAT began its slow but steady ascension over the national average for the verbal portion. It took only one decade for the math average to eclipse the verbal average, continuing to widen since that point. The difference is sizable and significant. The average SAT test-taker today produces a math score that is 13 points higher than their verbal score. However, this was not always the case. In fact, in the 1970s the relationship was precisely the opposite when national verbal scores routinely trumped the national math average by similar margins.

The first academic analysis of this gap was conducted by James Lech Ed.D., M.T.S. Lech posited that this gap could be "collateral damage" from the well-documented academic and social "erosion" known as dumbing-down. In other words, the SAT math questions progressively eased in difficulty over time while the verbal difficulty levels 1) remained constant, or 2) dumbed-down at much slower rates.

To test that hypothesis Lech constructed scores of survey instruments compiled from the math questions derived from publicly released SATs from the early 1980s through 2005. The survey instruments were intentionally created to conceal the source of the questions in order to reduce reader-bias towards standardized testing. They were then disseminated to more than 1,500 qualified high school math teachers that were randomly selected from a pool of every high school (both public and private) in the United States. Their responses were tabulated. Lech found that the SAT math questions were not getting easier at all in the eyes of these math teachers; in fact they were getting slightly harder.

The research hypothesis Lech tested was rejected: the questions on the math portions of the SAT are not getting easier over time. As noted, they are getting a little harder. This confounds the math-verbal achievement gap in general. There were several proposals put forth to explain rising national averages, year-after-year, on the difficult math portions of the SAT, as opposed to stagnating national verbal averages on the same test, during the same three decades.

Rothstein, in the 2002 New York Times article, admitted that "Nobody really knows why we seem to make more progress in math than reading. But one likely cause is that students learn math mostly in school, while literacy also comes from habits at home. Even if reading instruction improves, scores would suffer if students did less out-of-school reading or had a less literate home environment."


...
Wikipedia

...