Too many students go off to college and don’t learn much because too many institutions of higher learning have low expectations and don’t require students to do significant amounts of reading and writing.
That’s one of the key findings of a new Social Science Research Council report and book to be released at a panel discussion today in Washington, D.C.
The book is titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the CLA Longitudinal Study. The report, an abridged version of the book that updates certain findings made while the book was in production, is titled “Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project.” CLA stands for Collegiate Learning Assessment, an instrument developed to measure various “skills-based” competencies such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning and written communication. Its purpose is to improve undergraduate education through assessment, professional development, best practices and collaboration.
Dewayne Matthews, vice president for policy and strategy at the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education, a sponsor of the research, says the findings highlight the need for colleges and universities to examine ways to bring about more effective learning. Currently, he says, many institutions seek to explain away disappointing scores by citing individual characteristics of students.
“You take students and control for every possible variable you could think of and put those same students in different institutions and they learn better in some institutions than in others,” Matthews says of SSRC’s findings. “That is a very significant finding. All of this suggests that colleges and universities can have a big impact on how students learn.”
Among other things, the study found that students who took courses that required both significant reading (more than 40 pages per week) and writing (more than 20 pages per semester) had higher rates of learning.
However, in a typical semester, 32 percent of students did not take any course with such reading requirements, and 50 percent did not take a course with the necessary writing requirements.
