Education: Smarter Seniors

For more than a decade educators and parents alike have been lamenting the steadily declining scores of high-school seniors on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Now, a University of Michigan psychologist forecasts a reversal in the scores—and without any tightening up of teaching methods or reduction in TV watching, factors that he plays down as reasons for the decline. The reversal, Robert Zajonc says, may come about simply as a result of demographic changes. Zajonc notes, as other researchers have also observed, that the circumstances of being the first-born and of being a member of a small family both lead to...