About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.
The test, administered last year, showed that there were modest increases in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar exam was given, in 2002. But the skills of high-performing eighth and 12th graders remained flat or declined.
Girls far outperformed boys in the test, with 41 percent of eighth-grade girls scoring at or above the proficient level, compared with 20 percent of eighth-grade boys.
New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with more than half their students scoring at or above the proficient level (56 percent in New Jersey, 53 percent in Connecticut). Those two and seventeen other states ranked above New York, where 31 percent of students wrote at the proficient level.
Authorities in the federal government’s school testing program said they were encouraged by the results, especially since they seemed to counter other recent indicators suggesting a decline in Americans’ writing abilities.
“I am happy to report, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that the death of writing has been greatly exaggerated,” said Amanda P. Avallone, an eighth-grade English teacher who is a vice chairwoman of the board that oversees the federal testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.
Still, some experts questioned whether the test, which asks students to write brief essays in a short time, gave an accurate measurement of their writing ability.
The results were released at a news conference Thursday at the Library of Congress in Washington.
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about what he called “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence,” because young Americans are doing most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.
“The sentence is the biggest casualty,” Mr. Billington said. “To what extent is students’ writing getting clearer? Is that still being taught?”
Ms. Avallone sought to allay his concerns.
“I know that the sentence has not been put to rest as a unit of communication,” she said.
Ms. Avallone said the differences between girls’ and boys’ scores may result in part from lower literacy expectations for boys in public schools.
“These days I seldom, if ever, hear the message that math and science do not matter for girls, yet I do still encounter the myth that many boys won’t really need to write very much or very well once they leave school,” Ms. Avallone said.
The national writing test was given to 140,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th grade students, selected to form a representative sample of all students nationwide in those grades. Each student wrote two 25-minute essays, designed to measure student skills at writing to inform, persuade and tell stories.
Overall, 33 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level, which the test designers defined as competency in carrying out challenging academic tasks, while 88 percent scored at or above the basic level, defined as partial mastery of the skills needed for proficient work.
While 33 percent of eighth graders writing with proficiency may not sound like a lot, it is the best performance by eighth graders on any subject matter tested in the national assessment program in the last three years. Smaller percentages of eighth-grade students have performed at the proficiency level in reading, math, science, civics or history tests. Only 17 percent of eighth graders managed a proficient score on the nationwide history exam in 2006, for example.
“These results pleased and encouraged me,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s 60 largest urban districts. “A lot of cities have introduced explicit writing programs. You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”
There were large differences in scores from state to state. Mississippi ranked last, with only 15 percent of students writing at the proficiency level.
The encouraging overall results contrasted with some other recent indicators of Americans’ writing prowess. A survey of 120 corporations conducted by the College Board in 2003, for instance, concluded that one-third of employees at the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly, and that businesses were spending billions of dollars on remedial training, some of it for new hires straight out of college.
“Overall, American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, the founder of Concord Review, a journal published in Massachusetts that features history research papers written by high school students. He expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills because, he said, it only tests their ability to write very brief essays jotted out in half an hour.
“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it — and nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly,” he said.
Mr. Fitzhugh cited findings of a 2006 survey of college professors, in which a large majority said they thought most high school graduates came to college with limited writing skills.