Education, Literacy, and Culture

December 15, 2005
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education

American adults can read a newspaper or magazine about as well as they could a decade ago, but have made significant strides in performing literacy tasks that involve computation, according to the first national study of adult literacy since 1992.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), released today by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), found little change between 1992 and 2003 in adults' ability to read and understand sentences and paragraphs or to understand documents such as job applications.

&lqt;One adult unable to read is one too many in America,&lqt; said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who today announced plans to coordinate adult education efforts in 2006 across multiple federal agencies. &lqt;We must take a comprehensive and preventive approach, beginning with elementary schools and with special emphasis in our high schools. We must focus resources toward proven, research-based methods to ensure that all adults have the necessary literacy skills to be successful.&lqt;

African Americans scored higher in 2003 than in 1992 in all three categories, increasing 16 points in quantitative, eight points in document and six points in prose literacy. Overall, adults have improved in document and quantitative literacy with a smaller percentage of adults in 2003 in the Below Basic category compared to 1992. Whites, African Americans and Asian/Pacific Islanders have improved in all three measures of literacy with a smaller percentage in 2003 in the Below Basic category compared to 1992.

Hispanic adults showed a decrease in scores for both prose and document literacy and a higher percentage in the Below Basic category. The report also showed that five percent of U.S. adults, about 11 million people, were termed &lqt;nonliterate&lqt; in English, meaning interviewers could not communicate with them or that they were unable to answer a minimum number of questions.

NAAL in 2003 assessed a nationally representative sample of more than 19,000 Americans age 16 and older, most in their homes and some in prisons. NCES, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, conducted the assessment in both 1992 and 2003.

NAAL uses three categories to define English-language literacy: prose, document and quantitative. Prose literacy includes the skills needed to understand continuous text, such as newspaper articles. Document literacy is the ability to understand the content and structure of documents such as prescription drug labels. Quantitative literacy involves using numbers in text, such as computing and comparing the cost per ounce of food items. ...

From: nces.ed.gov/naal/
Note: Article may no longer be available, or you may have to register or pay to read it.

November 16, 2005
Elissa Gootman
The New York Times

When Susan Jane Gilman's parents picked up a hitchhiker years ago because he was wearing a Stuyvesant High School T-shirt, they were rewarded with this advice for their Stuyvesant-bound daughter: &lqt;Tell her to take Frank McCourt's creative writing class.&lqt;

And so Ms. Gilman became one of thousands of New York City public school students who, over the years, came to know Frank McCourt not as the Frank McCourt, of &lqt;Angela's Ashes&lqt; and the Pulitzer Prize, but as Mr. McCourt (&lqt;Frank&lqt; only behind his back) of Classroom 205.

Long before Mr. McCourt became a literary figure, he was somebody's high school English teacher. In his new memoir, &lqt;Teacher Man,&lqt; published by Scribner, Mr. McCourt recalls the successes (asserting control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom, or introducing students to literary criticism through nursery rhymes) and travails (patronizing supervisors, grading fatigue and parent-teacher conferences) of three decades in the city's public schools. ...

Monday evening, some of Mr. McCourt's students - among them professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and quite a few writers - gathered at Stuyvesant, in Lower Manhattan, for a reading by Mr. McCourt at a school fund-raiser ($60 a person for admission, hors d'oeuvres and a signed book).

There was Edward Newman, 41, who said that as an assistant United States attorney he thinks daily of Mr. McCourt's calls for simple, clear language. ...

Full Story: www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/nyregion/16mccourt.html
Note: Article may no longer be available, or you may have to register or pay to read it.

November 01, 2005
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ScienceDaily

Writers who use long words needlessly and choose complicated font styles are seen as less intelligent than those who stick with basic vocabulary and plain text, according to new research from the Princeton University in New Jersey, to be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

This implies that efforts to impress readers by using florid font styles and searching through a thesaurus may have the opposite effect.

Study author Daniel Oppenheimer based his findings on students' responses to writing samples for which the complexity of the font or vocabulary was systematically manipulated. In a series of five experiments, he found that people tended to rate the intelligence of authors who wrote essays in simpler language, using an easy to read font, as higher than those who authored more complex works.

&lqt;It's important to point out that this research is not about problems with using long words but about using long words needlessly,&lqt; said study author Daniel Oppenheimer.

&lqt;Anything that makes a text hard to read and understand, such as unnecessarily long words or complicated fonts, will lower readers' evaluations of the text and its author.&lqt;

The samples of text included graduate school applications, sociology dissertation abstracts, and translations of a work of Descartes. Times New Roman and italicised Juice font were used in samples to further assess the effect of fluency on rating levels.

Interestingly, by making people aware that the source of low fluency was irrelevant to judgement, Oppenheimer found that they overcompensated and became biased in the opposite direction. In a final experiment, he provided samples of text printed with normal and low printer toner levels. The low toner levels made the text harder to read, but readers were able to identify the toner as being responsible for the difficulty, and therefore didn't blame the authors.

&lqt;The continuing popularity amongst students of using big words and attractive font styles may be due to the fact that they may not realise these techniques could backfire,&lqt; Oppenheimer noted.

&lqt;One thing seems certain: write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent.&lqt;

Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly, Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology 2005, DOI: 10.1002/acp.1178

Full Story: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051031075447.htm
Note: Article may no longer be available, or you may have to register or pay to read it.

October 25, 2005
Deborah Franklin
The New York Times

Open your medicine cabinet, and take a close look at every prescription pill bottle you've got. Chances are, each vial is plastered with at least one colorful warning sticker that contains a bold but strangely ambiguous phrase or two  accompanied, perhaps, by a cryptic drawing. You might see, for example, a red sticker depicting a gushing faucet, with a message in fine print that reads, &lqt;MEDICATION SHOULD BE TAKEN WITH PLENTY OF WATER.&lqt; But, how much is plenty? Would a cup of coffee be acceptable instead? ...

These insistent little strips of paper or plastic  hundreds of them  are designed and manufactured by a number of well meaning companies, each according to its own format, symbology and color scheme. The warning stickers on prescription bottles have not traditionally been deemed important contributors to patient education.

Compared with the package insert prepared by the drug's manufacturer under the hot breath of the Food and Drug Administration or the one-page consumer summaries that pharmacists add, the warning stickers are just fluffy little extras.

As such, they are not standardized, regulated or even reviewed by the F.D.A. Nor are they generally tested for effectiveness before they hit the market.

But some health literacy experts worry that many patients, overwhelmed by a proliferation of paper warnings  often written in turgid prose  are relying instead on the stickers to tell them how to take medications.

&lqt;What I'm hearing from patients is that they don't really much use these handouts that are stapled to the bag,&lqt; said Dr. Ruth Parker, an internist who treats patients at the large public hospital associated with Emory University in Atlanta. &lqt;What they will sometimes do is look at the label.&lqt;

Dr. Parker recently completed two studies on the topic with Dr. Terry Davis of Louisiana State University at Shreveport and Dr. Michael Wolf of Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The scientists said that, so far, they had not heard of anyone who was harmed by over-reliance on the little stickers as medication guides. Still, their results, not yet published but already being talked about in health literacy circles, suggest that a risk does exist. And patients with reading skills that do not stretch beyond sixth or seventh grade seem likely to be the most vulnerable. ...

From: www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/health/policy/25cons.html
Note: Article may no longer be available, or you may have to register or pay to read it.