Education Majors Less Literate

AIR released an important new study in January detailing the literacy levels of students about to graduate from college. While most of the press coverage focused on the headache-inducing, depressingly-low overall scores (e.g. only 4 in 10 students finishing 4-year degrees scored as "proficient" in prose and document literacy; quantitative scores were even worse), there's a lot of additional good information to be found deeper in the report, particularly in the tables that break down the numbers by various student characteristics.

Some of the most telling data relate to the gaps between white and black students; there's a new Chart You Can Trust detailing those numbers on the main Web site today, along with the transcript of our recent national standards debate, new ideas on preschool implementation, and an interesting story from a community college professor in New York.

The college student literacy report also calculated average literacy scores by students' college major. The results:


*Significantly different from students majoring in math, science, or engineering

This is an unfortunately familiar taxonomy of which majors attract and graduate the highest-caliber students, and which don't. For all the recent focus on attracting more talent into science and mathematics, it's arguably the future teachers of America who need the most attention. As the chart shows, education majors have significantly lower levels of document and quantitative literacy than students who major in math, science, and engineering (prose literacy scores were also lower, but not at a statistically significant level).

While future science and math types beat out all other majors at various levels of significance in all three categories (not only, it should be noted, in quantitative skills but also in the ability to comprehend and use information from texts and documents), education and health majors appear to have the overall lowest levels of literacy. There's a deeply-rooted dynamic at work here in terms of who is drawn into the profession. Changing that is a major challenge for everyone working to boost talent in the classroom.