Student Writing Skills Up But Overall Proficiency Still Low
The bad news is that only one-third of all eighth graders in America are rated "proficient" at writing. The good news is that the marks of the lowest performing students have improved marginally over the past five years.
One in three eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of the "Nation's Report Card" test released today.
Yet our research has shown that parents' concern about "the basics" has actually gone down over the past decade. Parents’ worries have dropped even though employers and professors have serious doubts about public school graduates’ basic skills – especially when it comes to writing. A 2002 poll showed that for five years running, about 75 percent of employers and professors registered profound dissatisfaction with youngsters’ grammar, spelling and their ability to write clearly.
Tags: education 
"Elliston graduated with a degree in health and social care from the Open University. Though she's hugely proud of her achievement, she says that in the early days she worked up to three hours a night for weeks on end to construct an essay she was happy to submit.
""At the beginning, the most difficult thing was just understanding the academic words,"" she says.
""Then putting my own words into academic language was hard. And it was difficult to believe I was entitled to my own opinion or to disagree with all these academics who'd done years of research.""
Elliston started her degree after decades out of the education system, and with just one NVQ qualification to her name.
She believes the gap in her education was to blame but, according to some academics, many of the current crop of students gearing up to A-levels will feel exactly the same when they start university this autumn."
Post new comment