College Students Lack Literacy 687
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that "more than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Re:Complex? (Score:3, Interesting)
Too True (Score:2, Interesting)
What colleges? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many students -read-??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I found that a great many folks (students, and in general) simply don't read anything that's outside of e/mail. That just means that, for the most part, they're -way- less `literate' than folks who do read books (for entertainment value).
And yes, `useless' novels do increase your literacy.
The bad news is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
People, in general, are lazy, and learning to communicate is not a high priority for many. Learning to do many things is not a priority and until it is, they will not learn it. In all probability, some of those who can't make sense of credit card offers do know all the tricks for a dozen video games. I'm not saying that gamers are dumb, but that this demonstrates they are not stupid, just lazy.
The school system that my tax dollars help pay for should not cater to lazy students. They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can. So, with some trepidation that I've not considered every angle, I blame the school system(s) for the quality of graduates they produce. Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
Statistics (Score:2, Interesting)
I would question the benefits of education. The correlation between how much sex one and one's education is inversely proportional. Perhaps we should be celebrating how much more sex Americans are having thanks to the low-level of literacy.
8th Grade Education (Score:4, Interesting)
but then, the purpose of educational theories since 1900 has not been to create a responsible independant thinking citizen. It has been to create whatever citizen was desirable at the time, be it a willing worker, or a willing consumer. The end result is that we are now reaching the end of the rope.
Teaching professionals advocate throwing Money at the problem, sort of like in the IBM commercials. When the problem is as ineffective technique. But the teachers are illiterate as well. No wonder some people throw their hands up and go for home schooling, or other solutions.
Literacy or common sense? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is this supposed to be a test of literacy? It sounds more like they don't have much 'common sense', which is surely a good sign in an academic ;)
Note that this research comes from the Pew Charitable Trust, the same institution which told us that the gender gap is alive and well online [bbc.co.uk], claiming that women use the Internet for socialising and that men use it for hunting down information. They are certainly making a lot of bold statements and getting themselves in the news.
Re:Yay diversity! (Score:3, Interesting)
Mark Sanford (running for Gov.) got permission to put the show on his site at mms://sql2.slicker.com:1890/sanfordforgovernor/20
Good luck watching it until the
Not really surpriced.. follow the money... (Score:4, Interesting)
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
So ofcourse they try to make everyone pass.. nevermind the things they are supposed to be teaching.
Re:What colleges? (Score:2, Interesting)
it goes both ways.
And adults are? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Patience (Score:5, Interesting)
That's pretty sad when legal experts can't even agree on what they say.
& science 'not for normal people'... --BBC art (Score:4, Interesting)
Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...
Seen on Shacknews [shacknews.com]. I believe United States is also like this. Posted on AQFL [aqfl.net].
Re:I have been reading these responses, and (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose this is "to be expected": it's an art school, after all. However, my students excel at the type problems listed in the article (interpreting, analyzing, comparing and contrasting) : not only can they interpret things like exercise and blood pressure tables, they continually shatter my expectations when assigned the task of redesigning the 1099 tax form or visualizing the supply chain from raw material to mass produced object.
My point is, I guess, that these kids are absolutely and systematically awful at "traditional" skills of reading, writing, and rhetoric. They seem to have compensated for these issues, however, by learning to visually unravel problems and to solve them through less traditional methods. I don't think this is taught in high school, and so I'm left wondering two things: where do they learn these "innovative" problem solving methods, and what the fuck ARE they learning in high school?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The bad news is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Though this topic isn't exactly germane to the thread...but your assertion was true about 20 years ago, but isn't so true today.
Poor minorities are the main poor group voting for the Democratic party, however the Republicans have swept the white poor and lower class groups and middle income groups (as indicated by the demographics of the states they are winning.) Democrats are taking the high income coastal types (and Republicans are taking the very high income corporate executives.)
Interestingly, the Economist noted that the Republican party has no interest in making changes to the tax code to relieve the AMT. The AMT tax is typically paid by people making over $100,000 per year (essentially, people who are in the upper income range, but not exactly rich.) The reason that the Republicans don't care for the AMT payers is because they tend to be Democrat voters. The Republican base is now the middle class with campaign funding from the very rich, and that's what they will continue to concentrate on.
As for the grandparent post, both parties are happy with dumb voters. Nothing's better than someone who will consistently vote for a particular name or issue for little reason at all.
Re:Complex? (Score:2, Interesting)
What age adult? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, heres a partial explanation right here. People tend to develop skills as they need them. 50+ years ago in the US by the time a man was 17 going on 18 he was considered an adult who would be entering the career of his life. In a couple years, if not already so, he would also get married. These people needed to know basic finance but also worked manual labor jobs.
Now its a bit different. We don't really consider 18 year olds adult in the same sense. Adulthood starts after college graduation. Now we dont enter careers until age 22-25 and get married in mid to late twenties. College finances are not real world finances. You're living off loans, your parents help you out, the state helps you out with aid, etc. So its not surprising that people who we rarely treat as adults act like children. They have no incentive to act otherwise and have no need.
This is not common outside the US but more common in developed western nations where economies demand people with college and post-college educations for jobs that pay (checked for inflation) what old manufacturing jobs paid.
Extended childhood and a case of arrested development is part of the price of an educated society that has moved away from manufacturing and into a service based economy it seems.
I think its being very disingenious to cry "Everyone is stupid nowadays" without look at the radical cultural changes from 50-100 years ago. 200+ years ago people werent getting any education outside a few years of schooling and were getting married at around 15-17 years old and working the rest of their days on the farm. If progress means a longer childhood period then so be it unless you want to be a farmhand or working a lathe for 50 years until retirement somewhere (outside of the western world).
Re:Complex? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't tell me it doesn't exist. I've seen it too many times. Although the practice seems to have died down in the last few years, for a while that phrase was on every credit offer I received.
This is a cultural problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I visit people living in McMansions in various parts of the US, and I find many of them have no library, even though there is far more room for one if they so chose. Not surprisingly, their kids have little interest in reading, because their parents don't read, yet are "successful" - i.e. they have the McMansion and stuff to fill it. What conclusion do you think most kids today will come to?
"Success" and education APPEAR more uncoupled in today's world than they used to be - and that is awfully hard for even the best teachers to overcome. The people who are drawn to knowledge for its own beauty have always been a very small minority; for the rest, education is interesting to the extent it is rewarding. If the rewards appear less, the education is less interesting and devolves into seeking the form (degrees) rather than the substance.
Btw, I used to tutor kids in their homes for many years, so I have some experience/bias when it comes to how kids are educated....
Re:8th Grade Education (Score:5, Interesting)
"Taking, as we hope we do, an extensive survey of social affairs, which we find all in a state of the frightfullest embroilment, and as it were, of inextricable final bankruptcy, just at present; and being desirous to adjust ourselves in that huge up-break, and unutterable welter of tumbling ruins, and to see well that our grand proposed Association of Associations, the Universal Abolition-of-Pain Association, which is meant to be the consummate golden flower and summary of modern philanthropisms all in one, do not issue as a universal "Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society"--we have judged that, before constituting ourselves, it would be proper to commune earnestly with one another and discourse together on the leading elements of our great Problem, which surely is one of the greatest."
Now, can anyone in the room tell me: What the hell is this guy saying? If I hadn't told you that this was a racist tract, would you have any idea what it was about? The prose of the 19th century is very similar to the way a 14 year old would write today: a jumble of half-connected thoughts strung together with memorized pleasantries. It is like a very stylized and carefully memorized dance. Is it more grammatically accurate than today's average prose? Yes. Does it communicate more accurately? More efficiently? With greater depth? I really don't think so.
(The same system that you praise was lambasted in its time for relying too heavily on memorization and arbitrary but standard rules. For a critical take on the Victorian school systems, take a peek at Dickens' Hard Times. A critique of a similar modern school system can also be found in Richard Feynman's book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.)
A real life example... (Score:3, Interesting)
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
I found illiterate students when I was a TA (Score:2, Interesting)
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.
Re:Complex? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that it isn't accepted usage. The fact that it's only used by car salesman for confusion purposes would tend to support that, I think. It's a scam, period.
Re:Guess That Explains Bush, Eh? (Score:1, Interesting)
It called a rhetorical answer to a non-rhetorical question (aka dodging the question). They were asking a touch question about way the US has failed to get Osama, and Bush dodged the question and gave a childish answer.
Computers are at fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Switch off the computer, take out a book on elementary algebra and one piece of good English fiction.
Re:It's not just college students... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently including journalists. In a move that should surprise nobody, the reporter who wrote the article doesn't seem to have bothered to look at the data, and relied on the pre-digested summary instead. If you bother to look at the Appendix [air.org] to the report, which is just a few mouse clicks away for anyone who is interested, it turns out that the college students did substantially better than the population at large.
What's particularly interesting is that they also had a comparison of current college students with college graduates. The current students did better than graduates in all areas of the test. Their average scores were higher, a lower pecentage of them were in the lowest score categories, and a higher percentage were in the highest score categories, with the exception of one test where the 2 year college graduates managed a tie with the current 2 year students.
It would be at least as honest to report the results as saying that current college students are better equipped for daily life than the population at large. But that wouldn't be alarming enough. More importantly, it wouldn't play to the prejudices of the audience, who want to believe that things are going to hell.
Re:How many students -read-??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nowadays, I don't do a lot of reading. (Besides the Internet, but I don't think that increases literacy.) I find myself making lots of braindead mistakes these days. While no one (sane) reads a novel and studies the intricacies of its grammar (and general writing style), if you spend your life reading good writing, I'd wager you're much more prone to write well, as it's all you've been exposed to.
That's what worries me about "Internet-speak," the sort of "shud" and "ur" type of stuff, and a lack of emphasis on proper nouns. (Why the hell would you not capitalize your own name?!) It's not that I can't readily understand them (although there've been times I couldn't.), but it's a concern that, if I read horrible writing all the time, I'll start writing like them. In an e-mail to a friend, it really doesn't matter if I make mistakes, but once I start writing in very poor English to friends, I'm liable to start doing it in important, formal documents as well. Having done a lot of groupwork, the writing (in)ability of my classmates is downright scary.
There's a strong argument that it doesn't matter. There are some cases where I agree, when pedants argue over obscure, petty details. (It's okay by me to end a sentence with a preposition if it makes sense.) But when people write things like, "matt u shud chk it out 2mrw," I want to cry.
Anyway, I think I've gotten way off-topic from your point. Your point hit close to home: as a kid, I read all the time, and loved to read. (Sometimes in excess: I was yelled at a few times for reading books during class.) But until a month or two ago, I hadn't read anything, and the thought of picking up a book for enjoyment almost seemed absurd. My mother is a first-grade teacher, and I've suggested to her that one of the most valuable things she can do is make her kids love reading.
Re:Fewer books (Score:2, Interesting)
Fact is, most college students are NOT there to learn the various subjects they're signed up for. They just want the diploma, and the 4-5 year trip away from their parents is just part of it. They want to take that diploma and make lower middle income wages in some office. Not everyone is an intellectual interested in higher learning. For the most part, they're folks who want to make money, have fun, and enjoy life. If studying isn't what they enjoy, I wouldn't be suprised to find that they only study the minimum amount required.
For most students, college is just a phase of life that must be endured on the way towards the working world. The expectations stated in your first paragraph are still the goals for highschool to today(whether or not they're met). For people to make enough money to buy the lifestyle they want, businesses want a college degree as a minimum. High school used to be enough. College is the new minimum. The businesses will know what to expect from an undergrad student. When they want the self-propelled intellectuals, they hire on graduate students.
Those who personally enjoy knowledge(or want to qualify for that bigger paycheck), end up going on to do graduate work where they "learn to learn". Undergrad is for churning through basics, rote memorization gets the fundamental knowledge into their heads. Now with their fundamental knowledge they can begin to digest what information they're getting. They're learning to walk in undergrad, and learning to run as graduate students. The higher education experience of which you speak still remains in the form of graduate students.
As for myself, I find knowledge invigorating; it's an enjoyable diversion. I keep up with currents events, I buy history books on my own, I'm teaching myself a language. Small minor expansions of my educational horizons on my own time. However, the fact is that the bulk of my time is spent on maintaining that high GPA so that I can secure a good entry-level job with opportunities for advancement. Knowledge in and of itself is merely entertainment for a low-brow such as I. It will only receive as much focus as my primary commitments will allow. I am well aware of the "power" it has, and the liberating effects it has for the scholar. When we students do not pursue it, it's usually a choice that was made either consciously or subconsciously.
Re:Complex? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fewer books (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's standardized. (Score:3, Interesting)
But I needed a credit card to pay for it, because it was the only way I could pay that day. Accessibility is a huge issue. I agree with everything you said, I was just pointing out that having a credit card for emergencies can be really useful, and the GP had stated "if you need credit cards to pay for emergencies, you have a whole different set of problems that have nothing to do with credit card rates."
Credit cards are very useful tools. When I was younger and hardly had any savings credit cards bailed me out a few times because I couldn't budget properly and would be out of gas money before payday. They're great for businesses/governments to send their employees to conferences, meetings, etc. since they're much easier to use than company checks and make life easier for accounting. And I'll always carry one with a decent credit limit just in case something like my christmas emergency comes up again but for some reason I don't have access to my other accounts.
I agree with what you said, though. It's a huge poblem when the average american household has 15 credit cards and $7,000 in revolving (high interest) debt, although I guess it's representative of the current federal budget and mentality of most of the population...