12% of adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents

From College English majors can't read by Kitten.  The subheading is They have one job and they can't do it.

Most educational essays lamenting the decline or low standards of student capability often feel like they are working to establish a hierarchy and intellectual pecking order with the author above the subjects.  

But there are profound concerns about how well are our universities generating new knowledge, transmitting from one generation to another our accumulated body of knowledge and wisdom, and imparting to students the cognitive skills that will allow them to function well in an increasingly complex and changing set of systems.  

Kitten escapes being the old man complaining about these new generations of kids who aren't very good at what they do by focusing very empirically on the actual research and measures.  And it is indeed concerning.

The reality is that we, in our prosperity, have made a university education available to an ever greater percentage of the population than we were ever able to do in the past.  Where in the past perhaps 5% went off to college, and not infrequently the cognitively most capable 5%, nowadays 61% enroll in college.  Many attend subpar universities.  Or take unchallenging degrees.  Or fail out.  

But necessarily, the mean performance of 61% of the population will be lower than the performance of the prior reasonably top 5%.  Of course professors will be disappointed in the performance of students today.

And it isn't necessarily a bad thing.  We don't know whether 5% is the optimal attendance rate, or 10% or 20% or 30% or what.  Its more than 5% and probably less than 60%.  And certainly we should be doing a better job of channeling kids into programs and degrees which will allow them to achieve their greatest degree of productivity rather than indulging in feel good courses that cost them far more than they will ever be able to afford.

Kitten is reporting on some research and it is profoundly interesting.  Go to the source for all the supporting links.  

Last month, we were discussing what functional literacy means and how many of us qualify. The excerpt below is about the sliding literacy scale defined by the PIAAC, and what it means to score 4 out of 5.

At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents … Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences. Texts and tasks at Level 4 may deal with abstract and unfamiliar situations. They often feature both lengthy contents and a large amount of distracting information, which is sometimes as prominent as the information required to complete the task. At this level, adults are able to reason based on intrinsically complex questions that share only indirect matches with the text contents, and/or require taking into consideration several pieces of information dispersed throughout the materials.

To me this pretty precisely captures the task of reading and discussing literature as one might reasonably be expected to do in a college course.

How many US adults score at literacy level 4 or higher? About 12%, or 1 in 8.

She then goes into the details of a recent study.

This is the subject of a recently released study making waves in the education world. Researchers decided to sit with current college English majors and see how much they understood of what they read. They chose a very challenging text for the modern student, Bleak House by Dickens. Specifically, the first seven paragraphs. 

The results are appalling.  

We placed the 85 subjects from both universities into three categories of readers: problematic, competent, and proficient. A summary of our major conclusions gives some basic data for our ensuing discussion:

* 58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own. However, these same subjects (defined in the study as problematic readers) also believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.

* 38 percent (or 32 of the 85 subjects) could understand more vocabulary and figures of speech than the problematic readers. These competent readers, however, could interpret only about half of the literal prose in the passage.

* Only 5 percent (4 of the 85 subjects) had a detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House.

The researchers go into detail which takes this above the "Kids today . . . " kind of criticism.

Here is one example of a problematic reader, an English major.

These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.

What do we mean that they can’t understand the sentences? It’s best illustrated with an example.

Original Text:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Subject:

[Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.

The subject cannot make the leap to figurative language. She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech.

OK.  We went from 5% to 60% and that is probably too many.  Or more accurately, we are not doing a good enough job of matching everyone so that their capability is appropriate to the course of study which allows them to be their most effective or productive selves.

But the more interesting aspect, to me, of Kitten's essay is the light it shines on the mismatch between people at different class levels.   Universities are no longer sending clear signals.  An average person who cannot comprehend what is being communicated in the first few paragraphs fo Bleak House is not especially concerning.  Dickens isn't everyones cup of tea, nor is fiction, nor is 19th century fiction.

But an English major not being able to comprehend?  Read the whole essay for the details.  It is fascinating what people miss in a text that most top notch cognitive people assume to be transparent.