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Comment on Can you read and understand this passage?

You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it’s a much bigger generalization than “Kansas English undergrads” (which is such a specific category, why should I care about data that relates specifically to Kansas English undergrads?).

But my main gripe is the use of just one text. “People cannot understand this one book (therefore literacy is deficient)” is a much less convincing argument than “people cannot understand these 6 popular books from this time period” or “these 30 randomly selected fiction works” etc.
Is it well-established that Bleak House is representative of all the works we think about when we consider “literacy” and “illiteracy” as people’s ability to understand texts?

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starlinguk@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m sorry, but there isn’t a single word in that text that an English undergrad should have to look up (although I did look up the dinosaur purely to see what it looked like).

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andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy.

Yes, I’m alluding to a larger context outside of that study. In addition to the obvious harms of COVID/virtual school, many US schools switched to a model of teaching reading that omitted phonics entirely. This simply does not work for the vast majority of students, and this had already been demonstrated in the 1970’s.

The authors refer to that larger context here -

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My remarks on generalizing the study to Kansas undergrads was to point out that is an entirely acceptable sample size. In statistics, when you think about sample size, you have to think about the population you are studying. This study was specifically studying the literacy of Kansas English undergrads, which I imagine is a small enough population that you can generalize that study to. This would indicate that many future English teachers in Kansas are struggling readers.

We can put that as a data point next to several other studies about the US’s current literacy crisis.

As far as why they chose Bleak House:

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