Reporter Volume 25, No.7 October 14, 1993

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
 Press reports to the contrary, "there is absolutely no question that
American children read better today than they did 10 years ago, and
that they read better 10 years ago than they did 10 years before
that," says Michael Kibby, professor and chair of the Department of
Learning and Instruction in the UB Graduate School of Education. 
	Writing in the September issue of Journal of Reading, a
publication of the International Reading Association, Kibby says the
widely held public notion that the reading ability of American
students has declined is a myth that must be debunked because it
produces waste and despair.
	"The reason the public doesn't know that reading ability has
improved steadily over the last 150 years is because reporters writing
on this subject often can't interpret statistical reports," says
Kibby. "They draw inaccurate conclusions from complex data and end up
pandering to our worst fears about the state of American education."
	The record must be set straight, says Kibby, because the
public alarm that results from these media hullabaloos isn't harmless.

	Myths about poor reading, he adds, have led not only to
despair among teachersQwho have themselves come to believe themQbut to
what he calls "a series of quick-fix panaceas like competency testing,
back-to-basics, criterion tests for grade promotion and national
testing programs. In the meantime, bona fide educational issues go
unnoticed by the public and politicians alike." 
	Kibby says one such bona fide issue is the failure to respond
to the fact that, while they are far from illiterate, less than half
of 17-year-olds are adept or advanced readers. Legislators and
government officials who are unaware of this are promoting various
kinds of post-secondary education and training programs for which most
of high school graduates may not be prepared.
	It is impossible to derive global conclusions about the
reading levels of U.S. children because before 1968, there was no
systematic national assessment or trend analysis of educational
progress in the U.S., according to Kibby.
	Having reviewed all data derived from more than a century of
"then and now" studies, restandardization and renorming studies, and
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, Kibby
says that "all data available for contrasting past and present reading
abilities display no downward spiral of reading test scores." 
	His conclusions are as follows:
	Students in Grades 1-8: 
		C All available data debunk the myth that there has
been a decline in reading abilities of grades 1-8 students in the past
150 years.
		C "Then and now" and restandardization studies through
the late 1960s indicate a continual gain in reading ability, although
it may be modest.
		C Since the mid 1960s, the data are mixed--all
restandardization studies show a continuing increase, but the
NAEP-Reading tests show no change in status.
	Students in Grades 9-12: 
		C Unqualified statements claiming that today's high
school students are less literate than in the past are totally
erroneous and not based on data and fact.
		C "Then and now" studies warrant the conclusion that
there was a continual gain in reading ability throughout this century.
		C Available restandardization data show increases from
the mid-1910s through the early 1950s, but since then the data are
mixed.
		C Scores on the NAEP-Reading assessments, probably the
most sophisticated of all the tests discussed, indicate continual and
significant increases in reading proficiency from 1970-90.
		C Secondary students today read better than students
in the 1950s and earlier. It isn't clear if today's secondary students
read better than students 20 years ago, but the best available data
(NAEP) indicate they do.
	In the "then and now" studies, Kibby found no evidence to
support a conclusion of declining reading abilities in the United
States. "As a matter of fact," he says, "those data warrant the
conclusion that the reading proficiency of today's students meets or
exceeds that of students from every other era tested." 
	In his review of trends from "restandardization" and
"renorming" studies, Kibby found the mixed results no cause for
despair. These studies are used by publishers of standardized tests to
revise currently used, but aging achievement tests. Unfortunately, he
says, it is seldom possible to control for the changes in demographics
in populations studied, a fact that matters less to the publisher than
to those using the data to analyze trends.
	The NAEP tests, first conducted in 1968, were the first
national assessments of students in the fields of writing, citizenship
and science. Today, NAEP conducts rigorous, sequential and thorough
assessments of more than 10 academic areas every two to eight years.
	The first NAEP reading assessment was conducted in 1971 and
has since been administered to 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in 1975, '80,
'84, '88 and '90 using a complex, rigorous sampling design that
results in a sample representative of the U.S. population in terms of
region, size/type of community, gender and race/ethnicity. Kibby also
looked at an NAEP-conducted study of young adults aged 21-25 to assess
the reading abilities of those no longer in school.
	Kibby agrees with national experts in the field that reading
instruction needs to teach students to apply the higher-level skills
of logic, inference and synthesis to reading texts. There ought to
also be a greater use of multiple texts in reading instruction, he
says, not only narrative texts, but expository (history, science,
math, etc.) texts as well.