Don’t know much about history: National Assessment of Educational Progress test shows failing scores for eighth-graders

Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress surveyed eighth-graders about their knowledge of U.S. history and civics. A sample civics question presented the results of a hypothetical presidential election with three candidates. Candidate A won 30 states, 271 electoral votes (50.4%), and had 47.9% of the popular vote. Candidate B won 20 states plus the District of Columbia, 266 electoral votes (49.4%), and 48.4% of the popular vote. Candidate C won 0 states, 0 electoral votes, and 2.7% of the popular vote. Who won the election? the multiple-choice question asked.

Only 45% of eighth-graders were able to correctly identify that Candidate A became president by winning the Electoral College.

The likelihood that an eighth-grader would answer civics and U.S. history questions correctly fell slightly between 2018 and 2022. On average, the performance of eighth-graders on the U.S. history assessment has returned to the 1994 level, when the federal government began tracking history performance in a consistent way. And in civics, scores fell for the first time, reverting to 1998 levels.

Are these declines attributable to the pandemic? Perhaps in part, as many students attended school remotely in the 2020-21 school year that preceded the 2022 assessment. We did see some declines in reading and math performance during those years, and good reading comprehension is essential for understanding and responding to complex questions that require reasoning.

But these declines on the 2022 U.S. history and civics assessments must be understood alongside the relatively low levels of knowledge displayed by U.S. students in previous years. The prevailing interpretation is that federal, state and local policies focused their attention on reading and mathematics proficiency, crowding social studies out of the curriculum, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels.

Addressing the gaps in our students’ knowledge and understanding requires significant movement on two fronts. The first is ensuring that students have an adequate understanding of the facts of U.S. history. Only through knowledge of these facts can we interpret what they mean, and construct accounts of the course of the development of the U.S. as a nation.

In recent years, though, many facts have been contested, with partisan politics arguing for one set of facts over another. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was reported to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” In state after state, however, political leaders have been choosing their own facts, suppressing key facts about the nation’s history, and its treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. (And, of course, we have seen the denial of basic facts such as who won a Presidential election.) These political disputes over what counts as a fact may have a chilling effect on what teachers seek to teach their students about U.S. history. They also have restricted the scope of the books and other curriculum materials on which teachers rely to convey our history.

The second front is the cultivation of critical thinking skills. There is some irony in the fact that the rise of expansive social media tools has actually reduced young people’s exposure to divergent social views and understandings of the world. Once, no one on the Internet knew if you were a dog. Now, no one knows if you’re a bot, or a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Crazy interpretations of events are just as accessible as grounded ones, and young people often lack the tools to tell the difference. Prof. Sam Wineburg at Stanford University has demonstrated just how susceptible youth—and adults!—are to the firehose of information, both credible and incredible, that the Internet provides.

The good news is that Wineburg has shown that critical thinking skills can be taught to high school and college students. Students can ask, “Who says?” and “What’s the evidence?” They can learn to read laterally, looking across several sites addressing a particular topic, rather than being swayed by a single webpage with bells and whistles. And they can practice what Wineburg terms click restraint, recognizing that it’s better to look at a set of Internet search results and choose one or more that look especially trustworthy, rather than simply clicking on the first one that pops up.

Students also can learn to move on from sites that present as facts things that they know are not true, which requires a base knowledge of facts. Thus, factual knowledge and critical thinking skills must work hand-in-hand, and our education system must organize itself to instill the ability both to comprehend and to evaluate information about our social, political, and cultural history. Anything less threatens the future of democracy in the United States.

Pallas is the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.