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College Students Lack Literacy
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that "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." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Credit card offers are considered a complex task? What kind of world is this turning into?
My college studys lacked lottery traning, and so farr, I havent one teh lottery yet.
Formal contracts & documents should be written in Internet slang. "If you fail to pay your credit card debt we will take your car lol"
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
Patience... Not Literacy... It takes too much time to read the fine print on those damn offers... Kids these days are too busy getting drunk....
God Bless College Life
-nick
I should have went to a US college. I probably could have graduated there.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I, for one, am not surprised. I never read __less__ books in my life than when I was in college. I was much too busy trying to get the course busy-work done to do any reading, or much learning for that matter.
My wife is a Graduate Student at one of the Ivies, and it is amazing how many of the students struggle with putting sentences together in their lab reports. We've found that they manage to construct some "sentences" that would make one of my elementary school teachers cry. It's amazing that these people have the SAT scores to attend this type of school. Apparently the SAT's verbal component doesn't measure ability to construct sentences.
Oh, wait, you mean that by including all this concern for non-academic characteristics like sports, diversity (of background, not ideas), and the ilk our schools have lost the ability to test for the right skills?
I'm sure this thread will fill essentially instantly with anecdotal stories about how dumb everyone was at our colleges. Yes, great, whatever.
Frankly, I wish everyone could have seen the great 20/20 special on our school system last Friday. We're crippling our ability to compete internationally by focusing on the wrong things: we don't want kids to feel bad, so we've got helicopter parents; teachers don't want to worry about getting fired, so we've got horrible teachers' unions; we aren't willing to let some kids occasionally lose-out because a public school failed to compete with other nearby schools, so we don't have vouchers like most of the European nations; etc.
Now, someone will come complain about how vouchers are bad for schools (despite universally benefiting the quality of schools in Europe), how unions protect teachers (despite the fantastic proof of how bad such unions were by 20/20, including a 10 page diagram from the Unions showing how difficult it is to fire someone), etc.
"Stumble before you crawl"
to those of us who actually deserve to be in college and are spending rediculous amounts for it. Back in the day, college was considered for the incredibly capable. Now, when I sit in my lecture classes of 500+ people, and listen to the conversations around me, all I can think is how utterly useless my degree will be.
So my boss was passing this article around a few days ago to make fun of one of our new hires. The new guy pointed out that all colleges are not equal. Strangely the study doesn't mention what schools were part of this survey. Does anyone know?
15-20 years ago a guy working on his PhD told me that that getting a PhD had become like getting a MA or MS had been a generation earlier, getting a MA/MS like getting a BA/BS had been, getting a BA/BS like graduating from high school had been, and so on down the chain.
I've always been tempted to dismiss that as just a "back in my day" story about walking to school in a snowstorm, but it's hard to dismiss certain facts. For example, Robert Graves tells us in his biography that when he an ~8 year old, about 100 years ago, he was "doing ok with Latin, but having trouble with Greek".
And now people are having trouble with their own native language when they graduate from college...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I mean, like read a -book- (that's not required for a course)?
I found that a great many folks (students, and in general) simply don't read anything that's outside of e/mail. That just means that, for the most part, they're -way- less `literate' than folks who do read books (for entertainment value).
And yes, `useless' novels do increase your literacy.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
In one of the classes I teach, I had to explain to a student what the word "abundant" meant. Even her Mexican lab partner was rolling her eyes.
Here's another gem:
"The geology of Mesa, Arizona is significant because my family has lived there for several generations"
___Fewer___ books, dammit.
The bad news is that its not just college students. By the time that a student graduates high school, they should be able to do the things being tested here, never mind college. If all college is going to teach you is to function as well as someone with an 8th grade education 100 years ago, we have a really *REALLY* bad problem.
People, in general, are lazy, and learning to communicate is not a high priority for many. Learning to do many things is not a priority and until it is, they will not learn it. In all probability, some of those who can't make sense of credit card offers do know all the tricks for a dozen video games. I'm not saying that gamers are dumb, but that this demonstrates they are not stupid, just lazy.
The school system that my tax dollars help pay for should not cater to lazy students. They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can. So, with some trepidation that I've not considered every angle, I blame the school system(s) for the quality of graduates they produce. Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Try being in a resturant during a power-outage or the ordering computer is down, and there's no calculator in the building. That's when you see the resturant staff really struggling trying to figure out the bill and then making change. As my Dad keeps telling me, the fine art of making change without a computer telling what the change is disappeared a long time ago.
They always come out with some dire statistic proving that nobody reads, nobody understands math, etc. Its best to take it with a lot of salt, because these studies are probably financed by book publishers, or organizations that would benefit from higher investment in education.
I would question the benefits of education. The correlation between how much sex one and one's education is inversely proportional. Perhaps we should be celebrating how much more sex Americans are having thanks to the low-level of literacy.
but then, the purpose of educational theories since 1900 has not been to create a responsible independant thinking citizen. It has been to create whatever citizen was desirable at the time, be it a willing worker, or a willing consumer. The end result is that we are now reaching the end of the rope.
Teaching professionals advocate throwing Money at the problem, sort of like in the IBM commercials. When the problem is as ineffective technique. But the teachers are illiterate as well. No wonder some people throw their hands up and go for home schooling, or other solutions.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why is this supposed to be a test of literacy? It sounds more like they don't have much 'common sense', which is surely a good sign in an academic ;)
Note that this research comes from the Pew Charitable Trust, the same institution which told us that the gender gap is alive and well online, claiming that women use the Internet for socialising and that men use it for hunting down information. They are certainly making a lot of bold statements and getting themselves in the news.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
If you've gotten a credit card offer recently, there's a medium-sized standard box they include on the black-and-white legalese page which tells you the real (not introductory) interest rate, for instance.
Despite this, some people will briefly glance at the color glossy flyer, see "ZERO PERCENT (introductory) INTEREST!" and be shocked, yes, shocked, when the rates hop to twenty-seven percent or something ridiculous like that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But isn't this great for those of us sufficiently endowed to take advantage of the feebs?
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
So ofcourse they try to make everyone pass.. nevermind the things they are supposed to be teaching.
I'm reading this and thinking about the earlier story about humans being hardwired for geometry.
Maybe the Egyptians were onto something with hieroglyphics - we should have anything that looks remotely complex traslated into a series of small pictures and icons, or maybe even comics. Imagine that; a loan agreement graphic novel.
And as I type that, I'm looking at the giant icons Slashdot uses for its stories and thinking "hmmm... stick one of those at the top of each printed newspaper story and everyone'll figure out what it's about". For chequebooks and tips, well if you can't do that you either fail sociably or get stung badly. Maths, the choice is yours... probably.
You read the article?
No one ever ends a rant on education with IANATeacher. Why is that?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
To be fair, I think that quite a bit of that came from a certain physics professor that I had. He was the head of the department, and I ended up getting him for about 8 of the physics classes that I took. He expected you to understand every nuance of what you had studied, and to understand it *completely*. Often he would ask questions that were seemingly impossible to solve, but if you looked at what he gave you and gave it enough thought, you would find that in every case he had given you everything you needed to know - even if it wasn't obvious that he had.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"Baby on board" sticker prominently displayed (wtf are they *for*, anyway?)
I don't know about most people, but I intentionally ram cars that don't have babies in them.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I wonder if adults, tested to the same criteria as the posted article, would fare any better. Every generation has morons.
BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.
Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...
Seen on Shacknews. I believe United States is also like this. Posted on AQFL.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Personally, I think a lot of this stems from grade inflation and its many causes. Instructor compassion, bureaucratic initiatives that try and get everyone to "pass," easy degree programs that idiots flock to, etc.
I swear, for many instructors the "A" is the new "C." Moreover, the "C" is the new "D-;" however, it's a D- which allows you to attain a prerequisite and move on to the next class.
Additionally, the bachelor's degree is the new high school degree, and the master's degree is the new bachelor's degree, with the exception of the MBA. The MBA is the new high school degree with sprinkles on top.
I also blame may of our educational systems problems on the ellipsis... fuck the ellipsis.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
They were original used for motor homes, so that in case of an accident, rescuers knew to look for a baby. Things got a little out of hand afterwards, though.
"Who needs math? There are calculators."
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant? Who brings their dictionary with them to a place they need to spell correctly?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There's a joke that circulates among math professors and graduate students: Calculus is where you learn College Algebra.
I should have went to a US college.
The past participle of "to go" is "gone" rather than "went". The simple past tense and the past participle are the same in regular verbs, so mistakes with irregular verbs are inderstandable. Nevertheless, you should be using the past participle with the helper "have" for the conventional present perfect.
My other body is also not wearing any.
I am disappointed by the articles "brighter news" section.
The research showed that the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than the rest of the adult population. The study leaders said "that was encouraging but not surprising", attributing it to "the spectrum of adults includes those with less education".
I am disappointed that they seemed to be inferring that higher education caused the additional literacy proficiency. The article (and I highly suspect the research) doesn't show that higher education _causes_ higher literacy. It only shows that being enrolled in college _correlates_ with higher literacy.
Of course it does - there are tests to get IN! Those with lower literacy don't get admitted to college as much as those with higher literacy.
Unless the research measured literacy before college and after college, and measured literacy at the same ages for people outside of college over the same span of time, and isolated the impact of other factors, it doesn't show the anything approaching causality. And it didn't, the survey (according to the article, I haven't read the study) only measured the literacy of students nearing the end of their degree programs, compared to another study's results on a general adult population.
I'm concerned about the study leaders' ability to interpret the results of a study. I don't see any reason why the higher results of college students is "encouraging", given college entrance criteria.
And, on the flip side, how was Graves at understanding technology?
Ah, so that's how we're spelling "playing Everquest" today.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Students lack literate for complex tasks
Yes, that was the headline. If professional writers and editors blow something like this, what's a poor college student to do? I'd love to think this was done on purpose, some editor's attempt at humor, but mistakes like this are far too common, but usually not so ironic.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant?
Yes. It's called my cellphone.
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's just backed up on tape somewhere."
>>and so on down the chain.
Well, heres a partial explanation right here. People tend to develop skills as they need them. 50+ years ago in the US by the time a man was 17 going on 18 he was considered an adult who would be entering the career of his life. In a couple years, if not already so, he would also get married. These people needed to know basic finance but also worked manual labor jobs.
Now its a bit different. We don't really consider 18 year olds adult in the same sense. Adulthood starts after college graduation. Now we dont enter careers until age 22-25 and get married in mid to late twenties. College finances are not real world finances. You're living off loans, your parents help you out, the state helps you out with aid, etc. So its not surprising that people who we rarely treat as adults act like children. They have no incentive to act otherwise and have no need.
This is not common outside the US but more common in developed western nations where economies demand people with college and post-college educations for jobs that pay (checked for inflation) what old manufacturing jobs paid.
Extended childhood and a case of arrested development is part of the price of an educated society that has moved away from manufacturing and into a service based economy it seems.
I think its being very disingenious to cry "Everyone is stupid nowadays" without look at the radical cultural changes from 50-100 years ago. 200+ years ago people werent getting any education outside a few years of schooling and were getting married at around 15-17 years old and working the rest of their days on the farm. If progress means a longer childhood period then so be it unless you want to be a farmhand or working a lathe for 50 years until retirement somewhere (outside of the western world).
When I was younger, I was raised in a household with a library. It wasn't a very big house, but the library room was important; this is where my dad would sit and read, and I could do so as well. It never had to be said directly to me (at least, not that I remember), I just understood that the books were important, they were there to be read, and that was an important way to learn about the world. The books were knowledge, and that knowledge was respected. Whenever we visited someone else's house, I would always look at their library, because my father said you can learn a lot about a person by seeing what kind of books they read. A house without books was not a home to me.
Now, I visit people living in McMansions in various parts of the US, and I find many of them have no library, even though there is far more room for one if they so chose. Not surprisingly, their kids have little interest in reading, because their parents don't read, yet are "successful" - i.e. they have the McMansion and stuff to fill it. What conclusion do you think most kids today will come to?
"Success" and education APPEAR more uncoupled in today's world than they used to be - and that is awfully hard for even the best teachers to overcome. The people who are drawn to knowledge for its own beauty have always been a very small minority; for the rest, education is interesting to the extent it is rewarding. If the rewards appear less, the education is less interesting and devolves into seeking the form (degrees) rather than the substance.
Btw, I used to tutor kids in their homes for many years, so I have some experience/bias when it comes to how kids are educated....
I don't understand. How can you use a ruler improperly?
Just in case anyone doesn't know, here are instructions on how to use one properly.
I hadn't heard of any studies being done to examine the literacy required to do things like "understand credit card applications". I was, however, aware of the astonishing fact that MANY current college students will go the rest of their lives without ever again reading a book. This research came out maybe 4 years ago indicating that in fact MOST college students (something on the order of 60%) go through school, even graduate with high marks and honors, without ever reading a book. Additionally, it was reported that many of these non-readers would in fact live out the rest of their lives without ever reading a book.
I saw a "Mother-to-be On Board" sign at a supermarket recently.
I'm thinking about making an "Abortion-to-be Inside" sticker in the style of an Intel Inside sticker. I could then make that "ding-du-de-du-ding" sound like on the Pentium adverts than flash my dick.
(I kid, angry pro-lifer, because I care...)
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Maybe I lack numeric literacy (numeracy?), but shouldn't 13.7 + 7 be 20.7, not 19.7? You just shorted your server a buck...
You would be surprised. Remember, your typical American ruler is broken into binary fractions of an inch (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and usually 1/16 is the smallest). In order to measure something to less than a whole inch, you have to be familiar with those fractions, how they convert, how to count them, and so forth. I can personally attest to the fact that many kids have no idea what exactly all the submarkings below an inch mean. They have a hard time memorizing the powers of two, which you probably take for granted, so they have to count how many marks there are to know the denominator of the fraction, remember that, then recount how many marks they move over to the edge of the thing they are measuring.
Sounds complicated when you describe it like this, doesn't it? You probably learned it at such a young age that you don't remember a time when it didn't make sense or you had to think about it.
Another sign of this is a somewhat new breakdown in the clothing and fashion industry. It used to be that there were just Fashion Designers, who controlled the making of a garment from mental conception all the way to the fractions of an inch, stitches per inch, seam width, etc., that were given to the manufacturers of garments. Nowadays, there are Fashion Designers, and Tech Designers. The Fashion Designer has the "creative" part, and the Tech designer is the one who translates that into inches, stitches, fabrics and so forth! In other words, the ability to handle numbers, fractions, and measurements is now considered difficult enough to render a new job position. I know this because my mother has been in the garmento industry for 40+ years. She is now a tech designer, because nobody wants to do that icky math stuff; all the FIT graduates want to be "creative" designers. Not suprisingly, tech designers typically get paid about 2 to 3 times more than fashion designers.
Sorry, I miss-read that. I thought it was only saying 75% of 2 year schools, I missed the 50% of 4 years. My bust.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
No, it doesn't help your credit rating to carry a balance.
Your FICO score (http://www.fairisaac.com/) is determined by 3 factors:
1) the length of your credit history
2) how many of your payments are on time or late
3) the ratio of how much debt/credit you have
Only paying part of your balance will hurt #3. It will not help you in any way.
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.
"Indeed, it is wise never to consider any form of electronic data as final." --Arnold Robbins
It is this, and not outsourcing, that will bring the United States to its knees.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I am one of those of the generation that grew up without computers. I seriously believe that learning to do maths by hand and read from a book and not a badly written sentence, edited for space by a semi-literate online author are the reasons I don't have these problems. Kids today are entirely helpless without computers (and judging by the quality of English on Slashdot they're helpess with them as well.)
Switch off the computer, take out a book on elementary algebra and one piece of good English fiction.
If your balances are always 0, you'll get no history as a borrower or making payments. It's a way for the system to fuck you.
Just like closing your unused accounts lowers your score by increasing your balance/avail credit ratio.
I personally think any institution that uses a scoring system to rate you should be required to give you the exact details of how that system works. You should be able to take your credit report and generate your own score to verify the score they have generated. With as many errors as there are in credit reports (and the kludgy system for getting them fixed), can anyone have any faith that they've been scored correctly?
It's a system designed to screw those with moderate resources out of as many of those resources as possible.
I'm thankful for my credit union, that's for sure.