New Report: Most U.S. Students Fail Civics, History & Geography
The majority of American 8th graders failed a nationwide test of proficiency in civics, history and geography in 2014, according to a recent report released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The report underscores the need for creative approaches to nurture a culture of learning in everyday life.
More than 29,000 8th graders in public and private schools nationwide participated in the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The students answered multiple choice and open-ended questions on the following themes:
Geography: space and place, environment and society, spatial dynamics and connections
U.S. Civics: defining politics, government and civic life, U.S. political system, government embodiment of American democracy, U.S. relationship to other nations, and role of citizens
U.S. History: democracy, culture, technology and world role
The results show that 27% of 8th graders scored proficient or advanced in geography, 23% scored so in civics, and just 18% did in U.S. history. Further, the vast majority of these students scored proficient; only 3%, 2% and 1% of all students tested scored advanced in geography, civics and history, respectively. The remaining majority of students demonstrated basic or below-basic knowledge:
Geography: 48% basic, 25% below basic
U.S. Civics: 51% basic, 26% below basic
U.S. History: 53% basic, 29% below basic
The good news is that overall student scores have improved slightly in civics (from 150 to 154 out of 300 points), and history (from 259 to 267 out of 500 points) from 1994 to 2014, with the lowest performing students showing some of the strongest gains in all three subject areas. The bad news is that the improvements overall over the last twenty years have indeed been slight, and that most students still fail to attain proficiency.
The NAEP is the largest nationally representative and ongoing test of U.S. students’ knowledge in math, science, reading, writing, the arts, civics, geography, economics, American history, and since 2014, in technology and engineering. The first national assessments were conducted in 1969, and have since occurred every two to four years. The NAEP tests students at critical 4th, 8th and 12th grade junctures, and provides a rich, long-term measure of educational proficiency and progress.
I suspect that if NAEP tested the same students’ knowledge of major league sports, video games, movies and television entertainment alongside geography, civics, history and the other subjects it tests, their scores would be higher on the former. I say this less to denigrate students for what they are drawn to. Afterall, most if not all human beings, not just young students, tend to be more attracted to entertainment than education, especially because popular entertainment is typically more visual, fast, simple, emotional, attractive and/or extraordinary while learning is typically slow, complex, rational and challenging.
For these reasons, for most kids most if not all their education happens in schools, where children are required or feel compelled to go. Outside of school though, now perhaps more than ever, children lead very different lives. With intensifying educational and job competition plus rising income and wealth inequality, upper and upper-middle class parents are investing more money and time into after-school and weekend enrichment – tutoring, test prep, music, arts, travel, etc. – (not to mention better schools) for their kids (Lareau 2003, Putnam 2015). In contrast, lower-income parents often don’t have the resources or wherewithal for such investment so their kids are more likely to play on their own, naturally gravitating to video games, TV, and other alluring entertainment.
Of course, much can still be done in schools to improve student learning, but a lot of public discourse on education pays insufficient attention to what happens outside of school. There is, no doubt, much and longstanding interest in how families, nonprofits and governments can nurture children’s development (e.g., see Cotton & Wikelund 1989, Carter 2002, Harvard Family Research Project 2012). But there is less attention paid to developing new ways to nurture a wider culture of learning to counter the pervasive entertainment industry. Educational video games are proliferating, yet still constitute a small fraction of video game sales.
Learning Life’s approach to nurturing a wider culture of learning is different. By spreading knowledge (e.g., facts, questions, comparisons) on important public topics from food psychology to terrorism through everyday surfaces – napkins, placemats, fortune cookies as well as PCs, tablets and phones via our website and social media pages – we’re working to develop not deliberate learning, but incidental learning: the unplanned occasions for learning in everyday life. Using everyday surfaces to spur incidental learning is not a panacea, but it is a largely undeveloped tool for nurturing a wider culture of learning, especially among the too many students failing knowledge tests like NAEP.
Cotton, Kathleen, and Karen Reed Wikelund. 1989. “Parental Involvement in Education.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Research & Improvement.
Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Five Facts on Net Neutrality & Open Internet
The internet has changed the way people find information, conduct business, and keep in touch. For many people, it is an indispensable part of their lives. However, an ongoing struggle is taking place over how the internet is provided and how open it is, a struggle pitting cable companies against “open internet” advocates. The following five facts offer some context on that struggle.
Special thanks to Learning Life content writer Craig Gusmann for helping to research and draft these facts.
1) Net Neutrality
Net neutrality, a term coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003, essentially means that the government should treat all data on the internet equally. This means that data cannot be tampered with in any way, regardless of where it originates from. For example, a web page created by a person in Idaho should load at the same speeds as a web page created by a multi-billion dollar corporation in NYC. Advocates of net neutrality argue that it is a vital component of an open internet easily accessible to everyone.
2) Open Internet
While the internet has been around since the 1970s, and publicly accessible since the late 1980s, then Vice President Al Gore helped advance the idea of an open internet in a 1994 speech he gave to The Superhighway Summit at UCLA. Gore asked, “How can government ensure that the nascent Internet will permit everyone to be able to compete with everyone else for the opportunity to provide any service to all willing customers? Next, how can we ensure that this new marketplace reaches the entire nation? And then how can we ensure that it fulfills the enormous promise of education, economic growth and job creation?”
3) Unnecessary Government Regulation
This is one of the common arguments levelled against net neutrality. According to opponents, net neutrality sets a precedent of government interference, making it easier for the government to control the internet in the future. Opponents also argue that net neutrality harms innovation because for-profit companies that control internet access cannot create “slow lanes” and “fast lanes,” charging internet content providers and/or consumers more for faster service, and hence that companies have less monetary incentive to improve their internet services and infrastructure.
4) Blocking, Throttling and Fast Lanes
On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to apply Title II of the 1934 Communications Act to internet providers, reclassifying broadband internet access as a telecommunications service and, therefore, similar to a public utility. There are three main rules in the FCC’s decision: 1) no blocking of access to “legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices”; 2) no “throttling” or degrading of any internet traffic; and 3) No “fast lane” prioritization of the content of favored partners or in exchange for payment.
5) The FCC
The Federal Communications Commission “regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.” The FCC is composed of five commissioners, each serving a five-year term. Each commission is appointed by the U.S. President then confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
According to the FCC, “Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party, and none can have a financial interest in any commission-related business.” This, however, does not stop any President from nominating and the Senate from confirming commissioners who will likely vote as they see fit, whether in favor of cable companies, or internet consumers. This is one of the many ways that U.S. Presidents and the U.S. Senate directly impact citizens lives, in this case their internet access. And the changing composition of the FCC as commissioner terms end and new commissioners are appointed by changing Presidents and Senate majorities make internet access an ongoing struggle.
Why do acronyms for international organizations matter? Acronyms are abbreviations of names, frequently the first letter of each word in a name. Acronyms are often used for the sake of efficiency or brevity in discussions on television, radio and other media, as well as in public meetings and casual conversations. Thus, it makes sense for individuals to know the meaning of common acronyms in order to better understand what is being discussed. This is perhaps especially true in international relations, which affect us often more than we realize, and in which acronyms are often used to summarize long names of organizations, treaties, policies, etc., The following Learning Life quiz introduces readers to five commonly referenced acronyms and the important international organizations they represent.
Note: Special thanks to Learning Life intern, Kane Boynton, for conducting the research for this quiz, and drafting the questions and answers.
Is there intelligent life beyond Earth?
As our technology has gotten better at scanning the skies so has serious study of the universe. In this newest addition to our Big Questions Series, Learning Life’s Craig Gusmanninterviewed three prominent astronomers — Dr. Seth Shostak of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Dr. Dick Carrigan of SETI and Fermilab, and Dr. Jason Dworkin, Chief of the Astrochemistry Branch at NASA Goddard — on the big question: is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, beyond Earth? Their answers below offer stimulating perspectives on the question and the nature of life itself.
Dr. Dick Carrigan: I tend to take the view that the environment around our Sun is not that unique. We’re not a particularly unusual place. In fact, it seems that we’re quite average. Other Solar Systems have planets, so we may eventually stumble on environments that are substantially better for intelligence. There are a lot of stars out there, a lot of galaxies, so there are many, many opportunities for life and intelligence out there. Further, in the universe, there are some things that run fast and some things that run slowly. There is probably a wide variety in the amount of time it takes for intelligence to evolve. There may be intelligent life in the universe that is evolving much faster, and if we make contact with such life, we could be dealing with a much higher brand of intelligence than our own.
Dr. Jason Dworkin: The universe is an awfully big place. So, throughout the past and future of the universe and all of time and space it seems likely. Now, is there intelligent life outside the Earth right now elsewhere in the galaxy? Maybe. Elsewhere in a ten light-year radius? Possibly, but the chance seems small. There’s no evidence for or against. Furthermore, if life does exist elsewhere it’s hard to understand how you would even recognize it unless it was microscopic.
Life is actually really hard to define. You know it when you see it, but a good chemical definition of life doesn’t exist. The best definition is a chemical-replicating system capable of Darwinian evolution. So that means you can only know it’s alive if you see it’s reproducing and evolving. There are a few cases where, according to that definition, it’s not clear if a virus is alive or not. Fire is not. Crystals are not, because they don’t evolve. But they do replicate and they do consume energy.
There’s no evidence of life outside of Earth yet. It may exist. There are environments where life could exist, but there’s no proof that life is there. We very much want to find it, but right now we only have one example of life and that’s terrestrial life. If we have a second example we’d understand life a whole lot better by being able to compare it against something. All life on Earth is intimately related using all the same biochemistry. You start to wonder, is that the only solution to making life work — using DNA, RNA, protein, carbon bonds, water, membranes, that sort of thing? Is that the only way to make life? Is that the best way it works or is that just the way the Earth makes it?
Dr. Seth Shostak:We now know, thanks to work of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and others, that most stars have planets. In addition, roughly one in five stars will have a planet similar in size to Earth, and at a temperature that could support liquid oceans and an atmosphere. In other words, it could be habitable. That amounts to tens of billions of “Earth-like” planets just in our galaxy. It would be extraordinary if our world were the only one to have developed not just life, but intelligent life. Although just having a lot of planets with life is not sufficient to guarantee that many of them (or any of them!) also develop intelligent creatures, in the last fifty million years many species on Earth have become more clever. Simians, dolphins, some birds…and of course us. So, it seems that intelligence has some survival value, and in any Darwinian system, you might then expect intelligence to arise eventually.
ABOUT THE EXPERTS
Dr. Seth Shostak developed an interest in extraterrestrial life at the tender age of ten, when he first picked up a book about the solar system. This innocent beginning eventually led to a degree in radio astronomy, and now, as Senior Astronomer, Seth is an enthusiastic participant in the Institute’s SETI observing programs. He also heads up the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Permanent Study Group.
In addition, Seth is keen on outreach activities, interesting the public — especially young people — in general science, but particularly astrobiology. He has co-authored a college textbook on astrobiology and continues to write trade books on SETI. In addition, he’s published nearly 300 popular articles on science, gives many dozens of talks annually, is the editor of the SETI Institute’s Explorer magazine, and host of the Institute’s weekly science radio show, “Big Picture Science”.
Dr. Jason Dworkin began research into the origins of life as a high school intern with Professor Joan Oró at the University of Houston, where he helped to investigate the prebiotic syntheses of amino acids and co-enzymes. He completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California in San Diego, where he investigated pre-RNA nucleobases. He then carried out postdoctoral research at NASA Ames Exploration Center, studying complex organics from UV processed interstellar and cometary ices in the laboratory. He founded the Astrobiology Analytical Research Group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to study extraterrestrial organic compounds relevant for the origin of life via analytical chemistry. He is currently Chief of the Astrochemistry Branch at NASA Goddard and the Project Scientist for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission, which launches in 2016 to return samples of primitive near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2023. For further learning, Dr. Dworkin recommend’s NASA’s graphic novels that explain the evolution of astrobiology with clear prose and engaging illustrations.
Dr. Dick Carrigan is an active physicist and Scientist Emeritus in the Accelerator Division at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) pursuing an on-going physics program there. He is also interested in investigations of the possibility of life andintelligencein the Universe. His major technical interests have included channeling of high energy particles, hyperon physics, the magnetic monopole conjecture, high energy scattering, pi and mu mesic atoms, photo production, and facility planning. He has been associated with several joint USA‑USSR collaborations studying high energy particle behavior at Fermilab and in Russia.
The good news is that overall student scores have improved slightly in civics (from 150 to 154 out of 300 points), and history (from 259 to 267 out of 500 points) from 1994 to 2014, with the lowest performing students showing some of the strongest gains in all three subject areas. The bad news is that the improvements overall over the last twenty years have indeed been slight, and that most students still fail to attain proficiency.
