A book released today makes a damning indictment of the American higher-education system: For many students, it says, four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in their ability to synthesize knowledge and put complex ideas on paper.
The stark message from the authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) is that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college (see excerpt).
. . .
"We didn't know what to expect when we began this study," said Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University who is one of the book's two authors. "We didn't walk into this with any axes to grind. But now that we've seen the data, we're very concerned about American higher education and the extent to which undergraduate learning seems to have been neglected."
In the new book, Mr. Arum and his co-author—Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia—report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005….
. . .
Three times in their college careers—in the fall of 2005, the spring of 2007, and the spring of 2009—the students were asked to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a widely-used essay test that measures reasoning and writing skills. Thirty-six percent of the students saw no statistically significant gains in their CLA scores between their freshman and senior years….
And that is just the beginning of the book's bad news.
The scholars also found that students devote only slightly more than 12 hours per week to studying, on average. That might be in part because their courses simply aren't that demanding: Most students take few courses that demand intensive writing (defined here as 20 or more pages across the semester) or intensive reading (40 or more pages per week). Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa's finding was based on students' self-reports, but a new analysis of Texas syllabi by The Chronicle offers additional evidence of the same point: Business and education majors at public four-year colleges in Texas are typically required to take only a small number of writing-intensive courses.
"What concerns us is not just the levels of student performance," Mr. Arum said, "but that students are reporting that they make such meager investments in studying, and that they have such meager demands placed on them in their courses in terms of reading and writing."….
See also 'Academically Adrift' (Inside Higher Ed)
2 comments:
Most disturbing. I'm actually glad to see this book come out (though I haven't read it yet and don't know how good it is), for so many academics are self-deceived about the good that we think that we do--or so it seems to me, at least.
I wonder if they broke the results down by *type* of 4-year college? (Surely they did--?) As we all know, research institutions (including even Cal State, I have heard) are far more concerned with faculty's scholarly output than with teaching and helping students. Small liberal arts or comprehensive colleges, however, may do far better for students; they (we) surely do care about "transformative learning," in the sense of taking students from where they are and opening doors to them to cultivate their intellectual and moral capacities. Hope that I'm right.
Anyway: great that someone has gathered evidence about this.
p.s. Sorry to be so self-absorbed that I didn't mention *community colleges,* which (from my understanding) also are truly about teaching and learning. I know that many at IVC are, at least, and I know that you guys DO bring about that "transformative learning," judging by how many of your students end up in graduate school and beyond.
MAH
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