Maybe I've failed the comprehension test provided by the color-coded charts on page eight, but if I haven't… Does anyone think it's an interesting coincidence that the Chair and Vice Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board are from two of the three states that scored higher than the national average for all grade levels tested (MA & NH)?

Sorry, I misread what you had posted. I was referring to the question that was asked, but now I see you were referring to the text they read from. So I thought the typo was an incorrect copy of the question that students were asked. I wasn't referring to your own post. Sorry.

I think there is a typo somewhere in your question. The one that I have states:

"On page 1, the author says that mint syrup PERMEATED the saved ice. This means that the mint syrup . . ."

As with the case of "puzzled," you really need to know the questions and what students responded to be able to interpret the result. 24 percent of students selected option D, which states that "made the shaved ice taste better." I can certainly see why students would have selected this answer. The question doesn't say, "the word 'permeate' means in this context . . . Instead, it says "this means. . . " (it's obvious to someone used to answering such questions that "it" refers to the boldfaced word, but the question is badly worded). One could certainly argue that students who said that "this means that the mint syrup made the shaved ice taste better" had an understanding of what "permeate" means: they just didn't correctly identify what the question was asking. So it looks like to me that you could arguably say that 75% of students had at least some understanding of what permeates means.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2011/2013452.pdf

He concocted a flamboyant elixir of mint. Its scent clung to his fingers even after he washed his hands. Then he shaved ice into tiny particles and served it mounted in a glass dish. Permeated with mint syrup. Scoops of rich vanilla ice cream to each side.

Obviously, that's a sentence fragment, but even recognizing that good writing sometimes uses such fragments, I cannot make this grammatical for myself.

If the sentence were "Permeated it with mint syrup.", then I could see it as having elided the subject, but as it stands it sounds like an adjective phrase, and I see no grammatical way of telling what it modifies; "glass dish" is nearest, but obviously senseless.

If the phrase were connected to the previous sentence by a common, it would then seem to modify the "it" that was served. That fits the apparent meaning, but is, at least to me, simply not one of the possible things expressed by the punctuation used.

It's hardly a wonder if students were having trouble telling what the author meant by the sentence fragment and failed over to choosing the unconnected true statement in (D).

Unfortunately, the mention of such a thing presupposes (I suspect incorrectly) that there is some standard level of comprehension of statistics that is expected of journalists, such that failing to achieve it warrants a remedy.

In my ideolect at least, "fall flat" means "to fail to elicit the desired reaction from an audience". So, a report can fall flat by not impacting policy or not conveying the result wanted by its sponsor, and students can fall flat with a musical or comedy sketch, but it's impossible for students to fall flat in a test.

Is there another usage of "fall flat" that I've failed to learn?

:-)

[(myl) There are surely genuine problems in many areas of education in many parts of the world, and genuine problems in adults' levels of knowledge and skills as well. But the stories that are told to illustrate these points are often exaggerated, misleading, or flat wrong — see "Freedom of speech: More famous than Bart Simpson", or "A reading comprehension test", for a couple of notable examples.

And overall, I'm less worried about how fourth-graders perform on the NAEP's tests than I am about whether the WSJ's reporters can read and understand and summarize the NAEP's reports, and whether the WSJ's readers can put the WSJ's summary into socio-political context in a half-way sensible fashion.]