Dr. David Mazel
Adams State College
You college students sure are dumb!
At least, so says the promo for a recently released book, Academically Adrift: “[M]ore and more students go to college every year…but almost no one asks the fundamental question…: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no.”
After surveying thousands of undergraduates at 24 colleges and analyzing student performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the authors found that “45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills – including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing – during their first two years of college.”
What is to blame for this state of affairs? The authors report that “32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week,” while “half don’t take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages.”
I’m all for requiring more reading and writing. But is it really true, as Academically Adrift’s sensationalist promo suggests, that so many students are not “really learning anything” in college?
The CLA claims to measure skills in analytical reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, and writing. Assume for the moment that it really does measure those things. The fact remains that there are many other things college students are expected to learn, including all the knowledge specific to their various major — knowledge not measured by the CLA.
Too many studies like those in Academically Adrift share the same problem, namely, that they reduce learning itself to the kind of learning measured by the CLA.
To see the problem with this reduction, imagine someone who wants to know whether a certain vacant lot contains any buried treasure. Imagine that our treasure-seeker runs a metal detector carefully over the lot and then, after this meticulous sweep yields no beeps, declares that the lot contains nothing of value — even though the ground in fact is rich with diamonds and rubies.
The lesson here is that if you reduce things of value to metals that set off my metal detector you’re likely to miss a lot of good stuff. Ditto for the reduction of learning to skills detected by the CLA.
Arum and Roksa are caught up in a way of thinking about education that is currently fashionable but is fundamentally limiting.
This way of thinking says, first, Let’s get together and make a list of the things we believe all students should learn. Often that list is compiled in a rather haphazard way, by people who are not particularly invested in the process and would rather be doing something else.
Next in this way of thinking comes the search for an “assessment instrument” designed specifically to measure the attainment, not of learning per se, but of the things on the list. Finally comes a kind of amnesia, a forgetting of the fact that not everything of value ever made it onto the list in the first place.
One forgets that the list was never more than a crude reduction of a much richer and more complex reality. One begins to mistake the list for the reality. (I call this final step the Tyranny of the Bullet Points, but more on that in a future column.)
There is another way to go about this.We could approach the question of collegiate learning in a way that does not, as in my little parable of the metal detector, involve front-loading a set of (often rather narrow) preconceptions into an (often highly flawed) assessment regime.
We could instead try to understand college as, say, an anthropologist might – as a complex cultural institution with a variety of not necessarily obvious functions – and then, in as attentive and neutral a way as possible, try to discover whatever it is that successful college students really are learning.
Only then – only after figuring out how higher education really functions – should we talk about whether and how it should be reformed.
What’s Been Said…