How to talk to an administrator

The short article (Speaking like a hedgehog, hearing like a fox) in May 20th's Inside Higher Education and the linked post to Tenured Radical offer some common sense advice that could be useful in the best of times and certainly in the worst of (budget) times that we are currently experiencing.

NAEP at a glance

"The Nation's Report Card: 2007 At A Glance" is a new brochure that provides an overview of the NAEP activities surrounding the math, reading, and writing assessments. "At a Glance" summarizes the results of each 2007 assessment for the nation, states, and selected urban districts [Las Vegas is not one of the 11 urban districts reported--pm].

The results presented in "At a Glance" examine the change over time in average scores for all students, in addition to the changes in the gender and racial/ethnic achievement gaps observed in the 2007 assessments. The brochure pairs these results with instructive graphics to help you understand the findings. "At a Glance" also notes how many students at each grade level participated in the assessments and breaks down percentages of certain demographic details of participants, including race/ethnicity, school type, and percentage of accommodated students. Find the "At a Glance" publication at
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009486

Interactive data charts available from Google

Still somewhat limited in their coverage but great fun to play with, you can now find population or unemployment data for states and counties and then interact with the data (do comparisons across counties, states, to the whole U.S., etc.). This is a Google search tool imposed on Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Centus data. Go to Google's regular search screen (Google.com) and enter, for example, population nevada or unemployment rate clark county
Here are some sample graphs:

• http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&idim=county:CN320230:CN320030

• http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&idim=state:32000&idim=county:32003:32023:06001

Google's blog entry is here:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/adding-search-power-to-public-data.html

Thanks to librarian Michael Yunkin for bringing this to my attention! I'll add this to the "Statistics and Demographics" tab of the Education subject guide, too.

NCES issues new report on adult literacy

"Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of the America's Least Literate Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) Supplemental Studies."

The 2003 NAAL assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL project comprised four assessment components: the core literacy tasks, the main literacy assessment, the Fluency Addition to NAAL (FAN), and the Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment (ALSA). Results from the main literacy assessment are reported as averages and as the percentage of adults in each of four literacy levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient. This report focuses on results from the FAN and the ALSA.

The Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment (ALSA) was administered to adults unable to successfully answer the core literacy tasks. Instead of completing the main literacy assessment, these adults completed the ALSA, which gathered information about their letter-reading, word-reading, word-identification, and basic comprehension skills.

The Fluency Addition to NAAL (FAN) measures the basic reading skills of America's adults. The FAN was administered to all adults who participated in the NAAL project following the completion of the main literacy assessment or the supplemental assessment.

Key Findings:

* Seven million adults, or about 3% of the adult population, could not complete even the most basic literacy tasks in the main assessment and were given the supplemental assessment.

* Nearly 1 in 5 adults in the nonliterate in English group had a high school diploma or GED. Among them, more than half (representing roughly 600,000 adults) had earned their high school degree in the US.

* For those for whom Spanish is a first language, a delay in learning English is associated with low basic reading skills. Those who learned English before age 11 had basic reading scores similar to average native English speakers (97 words read correctly per minute); however, for those who learned English after age 21, average scores were 35 points (or about one-third) lower. Due to the correlational nature of these data, it is impossible to make causal attributions, i.e., to say that a delay in learning English causes low basic reading skills.

* Adults who took the main literary assessment were able to read, on average, 98 words correctly per minute (wpm), in comparison to 34 wpm by those in the supplemental assessment.

To view, download and print the report as a PDF file, please visit:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009481

Study of reading intervention programs find no benefits

Effectiveness of Selected Supplemental Reading Comprehension Interventions: Impacts on a First Cohort of Fifth-Grade Students reports on the impacts on student achievement for four supplemental reading curricula that use similar overlapping instructional strategies designed to improve reading comprehension in social studies and science text. Fifth-grade reading comprehension for each of three commercially-available curricula (Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and Read for Real) was not significantly different from the control group. The fourth curriculum, Reading for Knowledge, was adapted from Success for All for this study, and had a statistically-significant negative impact on fifth-grade reading comprehension.