Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's not necessarily flattering for the students. My favorite sentence of the Wired piece is: "The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade." Yeah, because students twenty years ago really enjoyed their in-class writing...
It occurs to me, though, that this is a question that it ought to be possible to settle with Science. Many faculty have files of old papers and exams going back years-- it ought to be possible to dig up some representative samples of student writing from ten or twenty years ago, and compare them with modern papers on comparable topics. This is probably more feasible in the humanities and social sciences than in the physical sciences, as the standard lab equipment has changed dramatically over the last decade or two, but even in physics this could probably be done.
All we would need would be a few old faculty files, and some faculty willing to assign the same questions to modern students. And some faculty who would be willing to do some double-blind grading of papers selected from those two groups.
Of course, this probably runs afoul of all kinds of research ethics rules, so it'll never happen. Which is a pity, because I'd really like to know the answer (my own files don't go back far enough to check. I do have a box containing some papers I wrote as a student, but that's not exactly representative...).
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There are, of course, many potential confounding factors. I posted the link because I think the question it addresses is fascinating, but the work reported seems more like the beginning of a research program, not definitive.
I used to be in the "kids these days" school (i.e., kids these days can't write for shit), but I've come to a realization: Those of us who are exposed to student writing are a select group, and we probably don't remember how bad our writing was.
First, those of us who currently read student writing were probably in the upper half (or some higher cutoff) in terms of our performance in courses. We weren't exposed to the horrendous work produced by some of the bottom-tier students, and it comes as a shock to us to see such dreck in our current role as an educator.
Second, we probably wrote some pretty horrible stuff back in the day, but we don't remember that it was horrible. Go back and read some of your old work. I did, and it stinks. We just didn't realize it stunk back in the day because we weren't qualified to judge it.
I think Rich may be right - and not just about writing. I've been thinking this is probably true about almost any class we teach, and that it's important to keep in mind that the majority of the students in our courses aren't us (thankfully).
I'd be interested in seeing the results of the research plan you outline Chad. Someone should take it up. Maybe the Stanford folks will.
I would come down on the side that writing ability has declined. When a social scientist has to discuss grammar usage in the papers of his senior seminar students, something has been missing from the curriculum in high school, whether it is grammar or writing.
As a non-academic: what could be unethical about the experiment you propose? Assuming that the results were anonymized, I wonder what would be the grounds for not allowing it.
I was cleaning out stuff at my parent's and found my college admission essay and several AP English papers. They are terrible, awful, divel. Except that they couldn't have been that bad since I got into a pile of selective colleges with that essay and got an A in AP English.
I suspect you could use a school's collection of senior thesis or something similar to do the experiement. There were piles sitting around for the reading in the department office when I was an undergrad. The basic assignment hasn't changed in several generations.
There are, of course, many potential confounding factors. I posted the link because I think the question it addresses is fascinating, but the work reported seems more like the beginning of a research program, not definitive.
It is an interesting approach to the problem. I suspect that there's a good deal of self-selection going on, too-- the SAT scores and GPAs of the subject group were significantly above the average at Stanford. And we're talking about Stanford, after all...
I used to be in the "kids these days" school (i.e., kids these days can't write for shit), but I've come to a realization: Those of us who are exposed to student writing are a select group, and we probably don't remember how bad our writing was.
I think there's also a timescale issue, here. I'm pretty sure that I get more irritated by certain types of errors now than I did when I first started teaching, just because I see them year after year after year. There's a kind of cumulative effect that isn't obvious from the student side, where they're doing the labs for the first and only time.
Faculty, on the other hand, remember everything...
Dan, you would not believe the rules if a human subject is to be used in any way in a study like this.
The way to deal with the need for IRB approval under today's rules is to start now ... and finish the study 20 or 40 years from now. Once you have the approval and forms in place, you will be able to save a random collection of papers that have been "blinded" for future study (perhaps even controlled by SAT scores of the students since you might become more or less selective over a few decades). You could even team up with someone at a different type of institution who shares your interest in student writing.
Chad, the cumulative effect you mention is quite real. One time back in grad school I taught 3 recitation sections in a row. (Or was it four sections, uphill both ways?) It required true self control to avoid wondering why the dunces in the third class didn't get it after I had already explained it twice ...
1836: McGuffey's Eclectic Primer
2009: "eclectic," 10th grade vocabulary
2173: "eclectic," 4th year graduate studies vocabulary
With the certainty of economics, climatology, and Homeland Severity we are winning the War on Words.
the standard lab equipment has changed dramatically over the last decade or two
It's this that seems hard to square with my experience, having finished undergrad a little over five years ago. It seemed like most of the lab equipment was quite old, and given how many of the labs were described in Melissinos's book from the 60s, I would have guessed the lab curriculum and designs had been in place for decades.
A few years back, I was at my parents house and ran across my old AP English notebook,with the papers I had written. I brought them home with me, so I'd have a reminder of what my writing was like back in high school, and adjust my expectations accordingly when reading my daughter's writing. All of those papers earned A's, and I received a 5 on the AP test, but I wrote like the teenager I was. Being smart and getting a good education do not totally make up for simple life experience, something I think has been forgotten in the drive for "rigor" in the curriculum. From what I've seen, this consists mainly of pushing the curriculum down a couple of years, so that my daughter is doing things two grades earlier than I did.
@Dan #5: It's not just the IRB requirements that CCPhysicist mentioned @8. The kind of record you are talking about is protected by privacy laws that date from (IIRC) the mid-1970s. You might be able to use records of students who have died, but that will tend to give you pretty small statistics for any group born this side of World War II since you also have to hope that the records in question have actually been preserved.
The thing that I think has changed is that today we are more likely to actually see examples of bad writing produced by other people. I don't mean just people who teach; anybody can post on the internet, and many who do are amazingly bad writers. Back in my school days, we would not have seen that sort of drivel.
Complaints about the laxity of the curriculum are nothing new. People complain all of the time that certain things that everybody learned in school when they were kids are hardly taught at all. That is certainly true, but a large part of it is because kids today are covering different material. Fifty years ago most college-bound kids would have learned Latin (I have an old comedy recording from that era which assumes that everyone in the audience would be familiar with Latin plurals--the joke is that the guy orders a "martinus" because he only wants one). Today, those who learn another language tend to learn a modern language, and not just French--Chinese is becoming increasingly popular, and that option was not available to me when I was a high school student in the 1980s.
If you look at Gerald Graff's *Professing Literature,* you'll see that back in the 19th century, Harvard profs were complaining about student writing. It's nothing new.
And like others, I've looked at my own student writing, and it was horribly bad. (And I did pretty well on papers.)
I actually wonder sometimes if student writing may be a bit better when they actually take advantage of the computer to revise. They certainly have a lot easier time revising papers with computers. I know "back in the day" I handwrote out a draft and then went through once to "correct it," and then typed it. The result wasn't pretty.
O Boy Kids today... This is a topic of the grumpy and the frumpy. Its not really possible or even useful to compare the textual facility of the great mass of people from on period to another. Bright, motivated people learn how to communicate, one way or another, now and in the past. One difference today is that loads and loads of people write emails and "reports" by the gigabit, who wouldn't ever have put pen to paper forty years ago. Email and texting might have improved the average person's writing skills, because they do so much more, or maybe it makes it worse, because its so easy. What bugs me is the mediocre writing I see in the NY Times and other standards of the chattering classes.
I do not remember where I saw this, but it is said that there is a Babylonian cuneiform tablet recording a scribe's lament upon the decline in educational standards since his day.