Lulled into lexical laziness by years of oversimplified schoolbooks, American students are in for a shock when they reach high school: Science books often are too hard for them to read, according to Donald P. Hayes, Cornell professor of sociology emeritus.
Hayes has formulated a plan to close the classroom language gap between science books and dumbed-down texts for nonscience subjects. Reporting at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Hayes and Loreen Wolfer emphasized that too many American students shun high school science for "easier" subjects, and they pass into adulthood as poorly educated, science illiterates with a vulnerability to pseudoscience. Wolfer is a former graduate student in sociology at Cornell who is now on the faculty of University of Scranton.
"They are not prepared for science texts with all the domain-specific words, the equations and the longer sentences. There is a gulf between the two bodies of work in the schools, and the gulf isn't getting smaller," Hayes said.
However, the answer is not to simplify science textbooks, according to the sociologist, whose computerized LEX system evaluates texts for accessibility or lexical difficulty. Instead, Hayes said, students can prepare to learn science by reading more challenging books of all kinds before they reach high school. "After World War II, we simplified books for history, English and other nonscience subjects by shortening the sentences and avoiding rare, unfamiliar words that might challenge readers to learn new concepts," Hayes said.
"As science becomes more sophisticated, the language of science inevitably becomes more specific," Hayes said. "Many American students are not prepared for the level of difficulty that they will encounter in science texts. They struggle through the required science courses -- not learning as much as they could -- and only the most able students continue in science. The dropouts are not getting as much science as students in other developed countries. This increases their vulnerability to weird pseudoscience and anti-science," he said.
In the past, Hayes has used his LEX measure of reading difficulty to criticize publications with so many rare words that only the rare specialist could penetrate the lexical flak. LEX evaluations are centered around newspaper text, at zero, with more difficult reading matter receiving higher, positive ratings and easier material receiving lower, negative LEX numbers.
The Cornell sociologist also applied LEX to evaluate schoolbooks used in the United States from the 1700s to the present time. He blames oversimplified basal readers, which appeared in American schools after World War II, for a decline in SAT (standardized admissions test) verbal scores among students who, he says, were not challenged by appropriately difficult reading material.
Most schools recognized the Dick-and-Jane dumbness of the post-World War II basal readers, and they replaced the worst with more challenging texts in grades one through three, Hayes acknowledges. But because of the cost, many school systems never upgraded textbooks for grades four through eight.
Hayes' report was part of a session at the AAAS meeting on "Enviroshock: Systematic Appraisal of America's Health, Capability, Productivity and Crime."
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