Word: graded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Readers who are perplexed by this quiz can thank the stars if they are no longer in school. For these samples come from standard texts and other reading used by millions of American youngsters in elementary and secondary grades. Bonnie Armbruster, a researcher at the University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading, last month ran an experiment in which she gave a group of adults 20 paragraphs from sixth-grade texts. "Their instructions," says Armbruster, "were to underline the main idea-if they could find it-and if they couldn't, then to write one of their...
...books are real, and they are the product of a process that outgoing Secretary of Education Terrel Bell has labeled the "dumbing down" of study materials for U.S. classrooms. Significantly, in a study at Harvard of sample texts and standardized test scores for Grades 1,8 and 11, Reading Expert Jeanne Chall discovered a correlation between textbook quality and learning. "We saw that in the years SAT scores went down," she says, "the year before, textbooks had also declined," The roots of dumbing down go back to the 1920s, when schools began systematic testing of students and concluded that...
...specific words and sentences deemed inappropriate. Subordinate clauses and connectives became no-nos up to certain levels; even topic sentences vanished. Textbook Expert Harriet Bernstein of the Council of Chief State School Officers points out that the word because does not appear in most American schoolbooks before the eighth grade. "And," she adds, "you can imagine what that does to the text...
...whose consequence is too often mystification. That mystification is compounded by ethnic, religious, political and other groups that have lobbied their attitudes and taboos into texts. In Maryland, Tom Sawyer no longer says "honest injun." Just "honest." And the bland Watergate reference from McGraw-Hill's fifth-grade social-studies textbook United States is a result of the almost universal avoidance of controversy in textbooks...
...USUALLY HAPPENS sometime in second grade when you see your teacher squeezing the Chatmin or checking the price on a pound of Purdue chicken; the shocking notton that Miss Teachingbody lives outside the classroom Later on, sometime before your first rendez-vous with the dermatologist, you realize that your parents don't always just read before they doze off. Somehow, though, the two notions never coalesce into the equally plausible notion that maybe Miss Teachingbody, too, does more than maybe loss her red inked papers aside and draw up the comforter before counting the sheep. Popular mythology lingers too long...