"Why Hide SAT Data?"
Thursday, August 31, 2006
by Donna Garner

Yesterday The College Board published the SAT scores for the Graduation Class of 2006. Please notice something about the data: The College Board refused to publish any statistics regarding the 49 grammar/usage questions even though this part of the Writing test is worth around 70% of the Writing score!  By far the largest percentage of the Writing score was not made public by The College Board.  Since the grammar/usage questions were either right or wrong, that should have been the easiest section to post to spreadsheets and to make public. Why all the secrecy?

When the SAT state profile reports were posted yesterday, they also held no state  data on the grammar/usage section.   When the Texas Education Agency (TEA) was contacted to find out how Texas students did on the grammar/usage section, the TEA said they did not have that data from The College Board.  A Texas state policymaker had to submit a written request to The College Board to obtain the grammar/usage scores for Texas and is presently waiting for that data.  (The  state profile reports also did not contain a state's score on the essay part of the SAT.)  How can state policymakers use the SAT to help them assess their students' progress when The College Board only posts partial information?  When the 2006 ACT results were released several weeks ago, the grammar/usage and the essay scores were easily found in the report.

This is my take.  I believe The College Board is heavily influenced by those who do not believe in the direct teaching of grammar.  In their minds, students will learn grammar while they write -- "writing by osmosis."  Unfortunately, good writing does not just "happen"  A mechanic would have a hard time fixing a car without his tools. 

"Math by osmosis" is like saying that students will learn math while they do their word problems, and goodness knows teachers across this nation have learned the hard way that that does not occur. Just ask any high-school algebra teacher!  They pull their hair out because their algebra students do not know their math facts.  Students need to be equipped with the basic tools of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division before they can do their word problems.

By the same token, students need to be equipped with the tools of basic grammar before they can apply that knowledge to sentences. Children learn from the part to the whole; the human body is constructed that way. Children learn to crawl before they learn to walk.  Children learn to read whole sentences by first learning the phonemes, then words, and then sentences.  Writing is the same way. Students must first learn to write a correct sentence before they can string those together into paragraphs and then into full-fledged compositions.

"Writing by osmosis" does not happen any more than "reading by osmosis" occurs by surrounding children with big books. That is the whole-language approach and has been thoroughly discredited.  Students have to be taught grammar explicitly and systematically.  This includes a step-by-step laying in of grammar concepts with opportunities for students to see and then practice those concepts in teacher-produced sentences.  This is called "internalizing the concepts" or making them a part of the students' thinking.  At that point the students should be expected to produce their own correctly written sentences, their own correctly written paragraphs, and finally their own correctly written compositions. 

The key to excellence is to hold students accountable all along the way for correct writing. As those building blocks are laid in, practiced, and evaluated, the writing assignments should grow in depth and complexity until the students finally emerge as capable writers who exhibit dexterity and skill in their writing.  Because the grammar has been taught explicitly and systematically, students should also be held accountable in their classrooms for using correct grammar in their speaking. 

One of the biggest advantages for those students who master English grammar is that they are equipped to apply those same concepts when learning other languages. A serendipity of teaching explicit and systematic English grammar in our schools is that more foreign language majors will emerge from our colleges/universities. Because the world is a click away on the Internet, it is more important than ever for the U. S. to produce an abundance of foreign language specialists instead of the small percentage who are emerging now.   

Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com  

Post your comments