Tripartite growth trajectories of reading and math achievement: Tracking national academic progress at primary, middle, and high school levels

Lee, Jaekyung. (2010). Tripartite growth trajectories of reading and math achievement: Tracking national academic progress at primary, middle, and high school levels. American Educational Research Journal, 47(5), 800-832.



Let me first preface this annotation by warning the reader that this article is extremely rough going, statistics-wise. Even with a fairly strong background in research methods, and what I believe is a fairly good understanding of various longitudinal research methods, I struggled through this article, which describes cross-sectional longitudinal studies of US students’ growth in math and reading achievement over the last 30 years, using data from well-known national databases of that time period. Perhaps my own background is somewhat out of date, but the ins and outs of various longitudinal study designs often seemed to be the main focus of interest here rather than the actual results. Those results were what I wanted to read the article for, and I almost gave up before I finally mined the nuggets of information embedded deep within this article. The reader has to wait until nearly the end of the article to get to the main point, which is that while US elementary age students have shown an accelerating rate of achievement growth in reading and math which is much stronger when compared to the growth rates of students 30 years ago (though in math the growth is greater than in reading), that growth rate levels out at the middle school level, and once students get to high school, their growth rate is actually less than it was 30 years ago. I recommend that instead of reading this article in the traditional linear way, from beginning to end, the reader should instead go directly to the Discussion section on page 824 and read that piece first; that section is where the main points are, and that piece is in relatively clear language that is not overly laden with statistical jargon as the rest of the article is. Then if the reader is interested in the ins and outs of how the author got to those conclusions, he or she can backtrack and look at all the information about the research itself. I am not criticizing the way this article is written; it is not that unusual for this particular journal and may fit its target audience well, though I have read AERJ articles that were easier to navigate than this one. I am just relating my own experience and what helped me make sense of this article.

So, what happens between elementary school and high school? And why has the high school growth rate dropped from where it was a few decades ago? Does all this mean we are doing better with our youngest students than we used to do, but that we are not meeting the needs of our secondary students nearly as well? Does it matter that we might be doing better at the lower levels if those gains seem to level out or even disappear by the time our kids graduate from high school? Why are some nations now showing more gains than the US, which used to be considered a superior nation in every way? As a person who was a child of the 60’s, I thought about what changes have occurred over the last 30 or 40 years that may have affected our educational system. The over-focus on standardized test scores may be a factor. As the author here says, in spite of the emphasis on tests and accountability, “Standardized test scores have not risen” (p. 801). Other factors, such as increasing diversity in student populations, changes in family and community structures, and the dominance of electronic media in students’ lives may be just a few contributing factors. Obviously more research is needed on this.