Reply to the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wish you guys could see the students in my college classes that I teach.  They lack the ability to take notes.  They don’t read the textbook.  They panic before a test and want a study guide defining exactly what is on the test.  They do not want to study any information more than what is on the test.  They will ask you questions the morning of the exam.  They ask for extra credit.  The quality of the student skill set has plummeted in the last 20 years.  They are used to fill-in-the-blank guided notes from middle and high school. They are used to re-takes.  And, they never see textbooks. It’s easy to ignore the soft copy textbook—why read that?  —signed a professor. [/quote]

+1000 (from another professor)[/quote]

Whose fault is that? My child is a senior. DC has has, maybe, 6 required books over middle and HS. They don't teach note taking, typing, computer skills as part of the basic education. They are given study guides. They are given extra credit, retakes, etc. They don't use textbooks. This is what they are used to and what they expect.

This is not all on the kids. [/quote]

Nope. It's on schools and parents.[/quote]

Actually, I think we can blame the passage of No Child Left Behind and teaching to the test that resulted from it.[/quote]

People love to blame parents for everything but the truth is 99% of parents are sheep who just do what they are told or what other parents are doing. The population of parents is constantly shifting because kids are born and then become adults so the parents you want to blame are never even the same set of parents. If you want to blame individual parents for how their individual kid turned out go ahead. But blaming major trends in education and student behavior or ability on parents makes no sense. There are good parents and bad ones. Involved and checked out. Same as it ever was.

The change is inside the schools and the systems and that's heavily influenced by a funding program that ties school funding directly to performance on (highly imperfect and gameable) standardized tests. There are good things about NCLB but there are a lot of negative externalities and the decreased focused on holistic learning (that used to require kids to read entire books and then write essays on them in order to reach college-level literacy -- that used to be like 90% of the high school ELA curriculum) in favor of teaching to the test has consequences. This is one of them. Schools and teachers have no incentive to assign or take the time to explore entire texts because there's no way to test it. Even in non ELA classes there is less time to let kids explore concepts deeply -- the goal is often to get students to a level of testing competence and then move on. Thus the trend toward higher and higher level math and science in high school with students taking AP classes across a broad range of subjects.

Compare this to for instance A Levels in the UK where students choose a smaller range of subjects and do deep study over a two year period before sitting for exams that yes may include a multiple choice or short answer component but also generally involve longer and deeper levels of writing (for humanities subjects) or practical components (for science subjects). And because of how university works there the incentive just isn't there for someone to be taking AP level classes across like 14 subjects. The point is to identify your area of focus and dive deep to gain real mastery. As a result students matriculating to Oxford and Cambridge are far better prepared for the kind of research and deep study that will be necessary at those universities.[/quote]

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