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Product Details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (January 15, 2011)
The authors' research and observations confirm what I see as very disturbing trends as I teach courses that involve complex, critical reasoning, and as I follow the experiences of current and recent undergraduates. Each year there has been a very noticeable decline in preparation for higher-level thinking. The students I encounter increasingly expect that they can succeed academically with shallow thinking and little effort by employing the social and strategic credential management skills that the authors describe. Those who seek a more meaningful intellectual experience feel surrounded.
The authors' observations about the importance of studious solitude and its increasing scarcity have obvious implications about the evolution of academic life. But I wonder if it is even worse than they describe. For example, the study hours they include in their data may be overly generous. Today, even those who want to learn and sit down to "study" are likely to be immersed in social media and other consumptive diversions. Students have many ways to avoid sinking into the depths of a subject or struggling with well-developed analytical writing, as the authors note. They rarely get honest and helpful criticism aimed at their individual intellectual and ethical development. I fear that the authors' important observations are only the tip of the iceberg. I hope that earnest students will read this book and set their own course.
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202 of 227 people found the following review helpful
This book couldn't be more potentially explosive if its contents were 100% highly-enriched uranium; unfortunately, the vested interests realize this and are already hard at work smothering the authors' findings. Authors Richard Arum (sociology and education professor at New York University) and Josipa Roksa (professor of sociology at the University of Virginia) studied over 2,000 undergraduates from Fall 2005 to Spring 2009 at two dozen universities (large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and institutions that historically serve blacks and Hispanics). They determined that 45% "demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college," and 36% showed no improvement over the entire four years. Including dropouts would have made the findings even worse. Further, those that did improve did so only modestly on average - eg. moving from the 50th percentile to the 68th in those four years. These findings severely undermine President Obama's proposal to boost the proportion of U.S. college graduates from 40% to 60% in ten years, parents' sacrifices to send their children to college, students incurring crushing amounts of college debt, and the rationale for average tuitions now having risen to 257% of their 1986 levels.
The author's assessment was made using the respected 'Collegiate Learning Assessment' (CLA) from the Council for Aid to Education.Read more ›
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45 of 50 people found the following review helpful
Arum and Roksa mean this book as a strong indictment of the American undergraduate experience. The report received a lot of media attention when released in early 2011. Its headline findings are that undergraduates experience essentially no improvement in critical thinking in their first two years of college, and a much smaller improvement over four years than we would expect. There are two broad exceptions: elite national universities; and classes that require more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester.
It's important to recognize that Arum and Roksa stack the deck, by defining "learning" in ways that advantage students in the humanities and social sciences. Engineering schools train students in a different way of thinking rigorously and solving problems. Pre-med programs cram student brains with facts. Both evaluate their students with difficult exams leading to professional certification. It's fair to say that neither Arum nor Roksa could pass those professional exams, which demonstrates that these students have learned a lot along the way.
I'd like to see a subsequent study that gets at the problem-solving skills that we expect of engineers or medical diagnosticians, and see how well economists or English majors solve similar problems in their own area of substantive knowledge. Certainly good grad students in the various fields I know can solve problems effectively, but undergrads are a mixed bag.
Setting that aside, there is a lot of provocative material here. When we look at their preferred measure, "critical learning," students in math, science, social sciences and the humanities do make progress. Business students, or those in social work and (ahem) education - - not so much.Read more ›
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99 of 121 people found the following review helpful
This is well written and analyzed (with good use of controls, etc.), and the findings are fascinating, though, unfortunately, not really surprising. The most significant problem is their mainly unexamined use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to measure "learning." They devote just a paragraph to discussions of the problems with CLA, with no mention, for instance, of Trudy Banta's insightful criticisms. So its arguments that certain groups of students fail to make gains at the rates of other groups are interesting and even useful, but these "gains" are gains of improvement in standardized testing. That's not necessarily the same as learning generally conceived.
Also because they surveyed students at only 20 schools, they are unable to say whether certain schools do a better job than others at fostering gains. For instance, do liberal arts colleges (there are two) do better? Do some schools perform better?
And they criticize surveys like the National Survey of Student Engagement because, as they ask, can we really depend on a self-report surveys to accurately measure learning, because respondents' memories are fallible. (Of course, that's true.) But they themselves depend on self-report surveys by students to describe which student-reported activities lead to more learning.
The book is worth buying, but one has to wonder whether their methods and findings warrant an entire book. Then again, it might take the publication of a book to engender the huge media coverage the study has received. And maybe that's a good thing. Higher education needs to pay more attention to teaching and learning, and this book brings that issue to public attention.
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This item: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
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