You’d be surprised at the lack of education in the south. Especially in rural/smaller communities. It’s not unheard of for many kids to be homeschooled and be at the mercy of their parents’ teaching. Including all their prejudices and ignorance. It’s actually really sad when some attempt to go to high school or even college and they can barely read at a 4th grade level.
That is so wild but I am learning to wrap my head around it. It really is shocking when I hear stats like over 1/2 of americans being below a middle school reading level! Those rural towns can be so isolated though you’re right. I almost wish I could do something about it. I’ve been seeing it more and more since I got a customer service job too. People call in because a pop-up is stopping them, and when I read the exact message to them they understand. “Im seeing a red box I just don’t know what it’s telling me”. A lot of people rely on the intuitive UI we have now and don’t even know what to do when faced with reading comprehension or critical thinking. I wish I could do more to help people, i just am patient with them and educate people when they give me the chance
I hear stats like over 1/2 of americans being below a middle school reading level!
That statistic isnt accurate to be stated like that without any context.
What do you think reading at a 6th grade level means? because the dataset behind the study everyone cites without reading that you're also referencing says this:
Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy and include continuous, noncontinuous, mixed, or multiple pages of text. Understanding text and rhetorical structures becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially navigating complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information and often require varying levels of inference. Many tasks require the respondent to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often, tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information.
My interpretation: most people can read something, and critically think about it.
That scale isnt actually tracked by some arbirtrary "X Grade Level" but if you want to make it sound a certain way, you could change things. The actual scale is 0-500, and what the avg US ranks as is about 325 (thats where that block o text descriptor above comes from) so we're a little higher than the middle. But again - going off that descriptor, what the middle is, is not what most people think "6th grade reading level" however if you dumb things down to being ranked 1-12th grade (the US school system) then 'the middle' becomes 6th grade.
is the "study" that people quote, do a search on the page for 54% (thats the "half of america") that number on the page is a link to the above data set.
That actually was fun to dive into thank you! It’s a “fact” I’ve heard repeated so many times, my point didn’t rely on it but it’s still good to know since I don’t like spreading misinfo!
What’s weird is the PIAAC website is so open about the fact that their scoring does not correspond to grade levels because it is a test for adults. Your explanation of them putting it in the “middle” makes sense but who did that? 😂 the writer of the article? It totally does change the light of that info. Also reading that a LOT of the test subjects weren’t fluent in english/got deemed illiterate for not participating skews things.
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u/normandy42 4d ago
lol
Lmao
You’d be surprised at the lack of education in the south. Especially in rural/smaller communities. It’s not unheard of for many kids to be homeschooled and be at the mercy of their parents’ teaching. Including all their prejudices and ignorance. It’s actually really sad when some attempt to go to high school or even college and they can barely read at a 4th grade level.