Whereas the proportion of students who scored high in the verbal section was originally 7 percent, it is now 3 percent. With pervasive television and other media, this should not be surprising, but it is not necessarily a cause for alarm. They watched movies and videotapes, read books and articles, played computer simulations, and videotaped an interview with Robert Ballard, the man who led the successful Titanic search expedition. For purposes of the largely textbound SAT verbal section, however, they might have been better off simply reading material and writing a report. The picture is different in math.
Test scores are at all-time highs.
But trends nationwide closely match those in Iowa. This is important because the Iowa State Testing Program has been around since the 1930s. It is not a recently imposed, high-stakes program where someone's salary or job hangs in the balance. Moreover, unlike other commercial achievement tests, new forms of the ITBS are carefully equated to old forms, making the tracking of trend data much more reliable. In addition, it is often difficult to interpret state-level test scores over time because so many variables change.