Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct on a version of the United States Citizenship Test. Matthew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog thought that was pretty pathetic–new immigrants to the U.S. have to answer six or more correct–until they gave the same test to kids in Oklahoma. The results were not OK.
Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma! That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.
“These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English,” Ladner concludes. Over at Joanne Jacobs, guest blogger Diana Senechal says Ladner’s right. ”According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit,” she writes.
“I have an empty metal coffee pot in my office marked “Sweden Civics Survey Fund,” Ladner writes. “Please drop by a give what you can afford. Once it gets to a couple of thousand bucks, I’ll retain the pollster to give this exact same survey on AMERICAN civics to high school students in Sweden.”
Great idea. I’ve got a ten-spot in my hand, Matthew. What’s the address?
If I remember correctly, this same report found that only 26% of Arizona could name George Washington as the nation’s first president. (Am I remembering correctly?) That was a jarring statistic for me. If true, things really are dire.
But it doesn’t correspond to what I see in other research. In a recent Common Core report, for example, 73 percent of high school students could identify George Washington as the commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. You’d think they would also know he was the first president.
Perhaps we can attribute the discrepancy to the difference between open response items and multiple choice items–but I still wonder what’s going on. A finding that almost 3/4 of Arizona students cannot name Washington as the first president just stretches credulity. (Perhaps I’m wrong, but doesn’t that finding seem over the top?)
Of course, I don’t think American students’ knowledge of civics and history is anywhere near where it should be. But it’s important to strike the right balance between true urgency, which inspires decisive action, and alarmism, which breeds hopelessness and disengagement.
Multiple choice tests just benefit the teacher as they are easier to grade…scan a bubble chart or whatever they are called.
Fill in the blank or open response and essays are the better way to truly assess knowledge or lack there of…it also requires a child to really study…multiple choice don’t, at least not in my opinion…
The only effective multiple choice tests I have seen have been on the AP US History tests. The students had to read and comprehend the information. (Of course, this is the only AP course I have had experience with through my children.)
Hi. Do you think this is bombastic nonsense or a legitimate study?
I followed all your links and tried to understand what’s really going on here. It sounds like apples and oranges to me.
The applicants for citizenship are seated and answering a multiple choice question in writing.
From reading the information that I find from reading all the fine print available from your links, the survey for high school students was given verbally over the phone in a telephone survey where they had to come up with the right answer, not just pick the right one from four. My belief is that they were probably grading it very harshly since they also came up with the statistic that most people couldn’t name the first president. I suspect that mostly we could so long as George Washington, Washington, and other name variations were accepted.
While it appears responsible because of all the data and footnotes, I think this difference means that it’s structured to create headlines, not to find out if there is a real problem.
CoreKnowledge is in the verge of being a great organization except for this sort of sloppy work. You should have high standards and investigate this type of stuff before you promote and repeat it.
The mistake here was mine, when I wrote about it on Joanne Jacobs’s blog. I hastily took it as a multiple-choice test, and it was not. Thank you for pointing this out.
However, I would be surprised if the researchers rejected name variations such as “George Washington” as opposed to “Washington.”
It is more likely that some respondents didn’t take the test seriously. That is a problem with many tests that don’t “count.”
Diana, I think you’re probably right. If someone were to ask me in an unsolicited telephone survey who the first president was, I would probably say “Leon Trotsky” and hang up the phone. (No disrespect to George Washington intended. I’m quite a fan.)
The concern I had with the study was that it violated the laugh test. Are the results credible? Unfortunately, the news media swallowed the Arizona study whole some time ago. (Of course, I guess I’d have to eat crow if several independent and credible studies show the same results.)
This is not to argue that American students’ knowledge of history is anywhere near adequate. I just worry about the effect on public commitment to public education when people are willing to believe ANYTHING they hear about students’ ignorance–however dire.