Today, 1/19/11, I read a most interesting article in the newspaper. Oddly, it does not seem to be available on The Statesman’s website. Find it at the Hechinger Report’s site. http://hechingerreport.org/content/what-are-most-students-learning-in-college-not-enough-study-says_4979/ Predictably, the article laments that “An unprecedented [longitudinal] study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.” On this essay test http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/, The Collegiate Learning Assessment, a majority of the cohort showed themselves to have completed four years of higher education “without learning how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event.” “Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. And after four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called ‘higher-order’ thinking skills.”
Much of this is credited to how little time the subjects spent per week on their studies, how little they were expected to read and write. “Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than one fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits… In a typical semester, one third of students took no courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half didn’t take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the semester.”
I am not sure that I 100% believe these results, if only because they certainly do not reflect my experience as an undergraduate 50 years ago, when “We walked ten miles to campus, uphill both ways, and we liked it!” Actually I walked six blocks in the dark to my 7AM New Testament class, when it was -30 degrees. Still, the study seems well constructed, and the results are disturbing. I love the test itself. Compare it to our ISAT and weep.
The distractions of campus social life, extracurricular activities, and demanding work schedules are cited as reasons, at least partial ones. Does this sound familiar?
But in the midst of all this gloom, there was one finding that made my day: “Greater gains in liberal-arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study’s authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages per week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning.” Not surprisingly! There is a lesson here, and it is not completely what the Reformists want us to believe.