Panel Finds No Answers for Slide in County SAT Scores

A special commission of county educators failed to find a simple explanation for the dramatic drop by San Diego County high school students on the 1990 Scholastic Aptitude Test, known as SAT.

Outgoing county education Supt. Tom Boysen set up the commission in August after SAT verbal scores fell from 432 in 1989 to 423 this year, the lowest since 1983, when major school improvement efforts first got under way, both locally and nationally.

Boysen was particularly bothered by the drop in SAT verbal scores at the same time county seniors have been showing strong improvements in reading and essay writing as measured by the state’s major indicator of educational progress, the California Assessment Program (CAP) standardized test. The SAT scores are used by colleges as an admissions standard.

The commission, in finding no specific reasons for the apparent contradiction, decided to stress the need for continued instructional improvements that will benefit students taking both the CAP and SAT tests.

“There was nothing we could pin down right now to explain the scores,” Bill Berrier, commission chairman and superintendent of the San Dieguito High School District in North County, said Thursday.

“So we say simply that (over the long-run), kids are going to have to study harder and need to read more, and need to discuss more of what they read, and their reading needs to be of good quality, and they need to have homework related to what is being done in class,” Berrier said. “And parents and the community have a role to play as well.”

Berrier and his colleagues noted that the CAP test concentrates on vocabulary and reading comprehension, by asking students questions about a reading passage, and measures concepts that instructors throughout California consider important to teach in state public schools.

The SAT lists its vocabulary questions one after another without reference to an excerpt or literary passage, and measures reading comprehension and more general verbal knowledge with text materials not necessarily used in a classroom setting.

Berrier said that, although all 12th-grade students take the CAP tests, only about 40% of the seniors--those thinking about attending college--take the SAT.

But it is too early to conclude that the particular performance of college-bound students, those who take the SAT, is falling at the same time that the overall basic academic performance among the general student population is increasing, Berrier said.

Berrier’s group wants all teachers, not just those in the English department, to take a stronger role in developing reading and writing skills. It suggested that English teachers develop students’ abilities to reason better by concentrating on shorter, more difficult texts rather than by superficially presenting longer works.

“It’s a broad responsibility, and we have to keep working at it,” Berrier said, while not discounting the improvements that he and other educators believe have been made during the past five years.

The commission also recommended that school districts make available to their students special short-term SAT preparatory, or “test-wise,” courses that help students become familiar with a test’s format.

“There are advantages to knowing what a test’s (form) is going to look like,” Berrier said.

Because CAP tests are given at several grade levels and measure knowledge that is part of state curriculum guides, students are more familiar with its format, he said. In addition, the CAP scores are not reported for individual students, as are SAT results, but only for schools and districts, so some students may not feel as much pressure when taking CAP.