Putting Sociology into English

In a brave thrust at sociological jar gon, Professor Alan Simpson, who next year will become president of Vassar College, once transfixed students at Washington University in St. Louis by putting the 23rd Psalm into educanto.

"The Lord is my external-internal integrative mechanism," he droned. "I shall not be deprived of gratifications for my viscerogenic hungers or my need-dispositions. He motivates me to orient myself towards a nonsocial object with effective significance. He positions me in a nondecisional situation. He maximizes my adjustment."

Now Washington U. is maximizing its need-dispositions by launching a somber project with a slightly hilarious purpose: translating social science into English on the ground that "many val uable research discoveries" are now lost to uncomprehending laymen.

Along with conferences and TV shows, Washington's Community Leadership Project will put out a bimonthly magazine of translations, edited by non-sociologists. In the unedited words of Sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner, who thought it up, the $ 135,000-a-year proj ect will cut the "time slippage" between academic discovery and "utilization by individuals" in fields from business to politics. Right from the first, of course, the editors will face the puzzle of pick ing material that will turn out to be worth utilizing. Sample risks:

sbFrom a New York City schools re port: "High transiency pupils who enter low transiency schools evidently constitute a population somewhat different from that of high transiency pupils who enter high transiency schools." Possible meaning: kids who move around a lot vary according to the turnover rates of the schools they enter.

sb From the American Educational Research Association's official magazine: "Much more saliently than in experimental laboratory types of learning situ ations, typical school learning requires the incorporation of new concepts and information into an established cognitive framework with particular organizational properties. The transfer paradigm still applies here, and transfer still refers to the impact of prior experience upon current learning. But prior experience in this case is conceptualized as a cumulatively acquired, hierarchically organized, and established body." Meaning what?

sbFrom "In-Basket Tests and Factors in Administrative Performance," a paper describing an experiment at Columbia's Teachers College whereby 232 school principals were evaluated on how they emptied their in baskets: "The 120 x 120 matrix was factored. An orthogonal factor matrix composed of the first ten factors was rotated to form an oblique matrix having a factor structure as nearly as possible like that found for the original in-basket factor analysis. Coefficients were computed which reflect the relative relationship of each of the 120 variables to each of eight oblique reference vectors, each vector corresponding to one of the eight in-basket factors."

These examples seem to deal with trivia, but useful research does get lost almost daily in the scholar's effort to be so precise that he ends up being in comprehensible. In The Concepts of Over-and Under achievement, Psychologist Robert L. Thorndike, also of Teachers College, writes: "In the study of discrepancies between actual and predicted achievement, we are dealing with a set of discrepancies between actual final achievement and the level of achievement that would have been fore cast on the basis of the known relation ship between final achievement and some measure of aptitude or of initial achievement, or some combination of measures of both." Whew. Actually, the point is that "scientific" testmakers can not yet measure the human variables that affect academic success in school and college. Thorndike's book deserves to be read -- or translated. It's a splendid task for the stouthearted non-scholars of Washington University.

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