Quote:
More than half of students at four-year colleges and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills no matter their field of study.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization.
Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map.
There was brighter news.
Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.
Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents.
"But do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.
"This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don't do it," Finney said. "States have no idea about the knowledge and skills of their college graduates."
The survey examined college students nearing the end of their degree programs.
The students did the worst on matters involving math, according to the study.
Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.
Baldi and Finney said the survey should be used as a tool. They hope state leaders, educators and university trustees will examine the rigor of courses required of all students.
The college survey used the same test as the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the government's examination of English literacy among adults. The results of that study were released in December, showing about one in 20 adults is not literate in English.
On campus, the tests were given in 2003 to a representative sample of 1,827 students at public and private schools.
It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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I just find this so sad. So many of these things are, to me, very basic skills. This paragraph bothered me especially:
Quote:
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Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.
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How do you drive a car and not know that? I KNOW I have a 20 gallon tank. If my gas meter is showing up with a quarter tank, that's five gallons of gas. I get roughly 22/mpg. That means I have 110 miles left on my tank.
My question is, if people aren't picking up these basic skills by COLLEGE, when should we teach them? Don't we teach them already? It seems to me that these basic skills (such as finding a point on a map) were covered in elementary school. The quantification of how much gas is in my car is a basic math problem, one that certainly doesn't require algebra. I mean, I studied English in college but I still know how to balance my checkbook, calculate a tip, and do the other basic math life requires. Reading tables: also a math thing. Tearing apart arguments: I swear we covered that in both my social studies class junior year of high school and my English class senior year.
So what is the solution if people aren't learning these things in elementary school, middle school, or even high school? Do we offer a "refresher" course? Do we set higher standards for our tertiary institutions so that people push themselves harder to learn these basic skills? After all, what is the point in having a B.A. in political science if you can't comprehend the argument made in your daily newspaper editorial?