Friday, September 4, 2015

What is Causing Declining SAT Scores?


The Washington Post is attributing declining SAT scores to factors such as poor quality education and poverty:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-scores-at-lowest-level-in-10-years-fueling-worries-about-high-schools/2015/09/02/6b73ec66-5190-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines

No doubt these factors play a role but I personally think that young people today have more trouble FOCUSING than previous generations.

I suspect the problems in focusing stem from a variety of complex synergies including:

1. Media saturated environment defined by surface content organized mostly around violence, sex, and interpersonal relationships. Kids spend less time reading, less time playing outside, less time for quiet thought and reflection.

2. More exposure to environmental contaminants in food, water, and air that disrupt the endocrine system and other sensitive physiological systems. We have more incidences of heart, endocrine, auto-immune, and neurological disorders in kids and adults than suffered by previous generations.

Cognition is impacted by these and other conditions and factors. Sustained attention and critical reflection are mentally challenging and taxing. Our social and bio-chemical environments are converging to disrupt our higher-order cognitive processes.

I am convinced this is the case. I've been teaching many years and the demographics of my students haven't changed that much but their ability to focus in the classroom has definitely declined on aggregate. This opinion is shared by many faculty (although I'm sure the opinion is not universal).

What I am unclear about is whether our emotionality has been impacted. Students today seem to have more empathy for those that are different from them in some marked way (e.g., sexually, ethnically, nationally, etc). Increased social empathy is certainly desirable.


FUKUSHIMA UPDATE

Last couple of days have been quiet with steam down, although greenish, redish, purplish emissions continue to stream from unit 3

 

Not sure how well they will show up in this screenshot:



1 comment:

  1. There have been several studies linking tetraethyl lead to decreases and cognition and violence in the 20 the century. TEL was burned in gasoline and was ubiquitous in big cities in developed countries from 1930 to 1996..

    Lead is a heavy metal like uranium, plutonium and transuranic radioactive elements that did not exist before the atomic age. It is good that the lead research came out because in was an indepth review of serious neurotoxic pollutants cognitive effects on society and violence http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
    Most data and facts concerning nuclear pollution is taboo due to nuclear industry and military clamp downs on the media in the west.
    Heavy metals, radionucleides, and atomic industry wastes from uranium mining , bomb explosions, and nuclear energy waste started and have gone up exponentially sin 1945. Similar cognitive effects to teraethyl lead could probably be extrapolated to atomic age heavy metals and other radionucleides that also have mutagenic properties.

    I read a letter to the editor in the 80s, in a small town newspaper about a high school teacher lamenting the decline in academic quality of high school kids born post 1956 in his area of the us. That area was a down winder area that had a significant exposure to the open air bomb testing in nevada in the mid fifties and early sixties.

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