Unpacking Last Week’s “Students Aren’t Learning” Story
There’s a new book out called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses that got a lot of ink last week. It claims that only 55% of American college students improve their scores on a standardized test of critical thinking ability in their first two years of college, and that only 64% of students improve their scores on that test during their entire time as undergrads.
I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t speak in too much detail about its contents, but a few things leap out from the coverage.
First, there’s the fact of what the study doesn’t measure. Because it’s based solely on performance on a generalized test, it tells us nothing about what students have learned in their own fields of study, a fact that many news stories on the book have failed to mention, or buried. (That misrepresentation began with the study’