The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a standardized aptitude test administered to all individuals who apply to the U.S. armed forces. ASVAB provides an essential overview of a variety of key skills related to literacy and numeracy such as word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetic reasoning, mathematics knowledge, and general science.
A report was recently released by The Education Trust documenting results, state by state, for armed forces recruits on the ASVAB. The results are predictably depressing, showing that a quarter of students nationwide are unable to reach even the minimal passing score needed to enter the Army. Results vary considerably state by state, with Hawaii the worst and Wyoming the best.
So here's the interesting part: I extracted some state by state education statistics from StateMaster.com. I examined per pupil expenditures in elementary and secondary education and found that there was essentially no correlation at all between ASVAB pass rates and per pupil expenditures.
In contrast, however, I also examined the number of public library visits per capita for each state. Drum roll please! The correlation between library visits and ASVAB pass rates was a substantial r=.43. In other words, the more the citizens of a state visited public libraries, the more likely they were to have capable young people with the job aptitudes required to succeed in the armed forces (or for that matter, in most civilian jobs).
What you you think it means?
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Very interesting. Is there more of an education ethos in these states? Also, what's the correlation between library visits per capita and, say, SAT scores? Third thought: maybe the answer lies in part at the local or regional level, thus we need to look at that data. I'll have to give this some more thought when I'm not a bit jet-lagged...
ReplyDeleteIt is probably a correlation of people who visit libraries more are likely to be more interested in learning and thus better at the testing.
ReplyDeleteThis is similar to findings in freakinomics where having more books in the house correlates more to good test scores than does reading to your kids. Implying that actually reading in your own life is more likely to get your kids to read than reading to them, but not doing it yourself. There is also a correlation of people who WANTED to get into a better school in Chicago's school lottery and good test scores, regardless whether they got into the better school or not.