On his (and Josipa Roksa's) book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
Cover Interview of February 22, 2011
In a nutshell
This book is based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)—a project in which my coauthor Josipa Roksa and I followed several thousand students across 24 diverse U.S. four-year colleges and universities to investigate how much they improved on a state-of-the-art measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication.
When comparing the test scores taken after students had invested years of college studying to those taken at the time when they started college, we found that large numbers of students did not improve.
Surveying these same students on their college experiences revealed that they were in classes that placed few demands on them in terms of reading and writing requirements. The students also reported spending relatively few hours studying, and that they were often studying with their friends.
While we only measured the students’ general skills as opposed to subject-specific skills, we are skeptical that the results would be much different if another type of test was given—many of the students we followed did not appear particularly academically engaged with their coursework.
These students were largely academically adrift at these institutions, hence the title of the book.
We attribute this limited learning to the institutional cultures in the schools. Contemporary colleges accomplish many things, but our results suggest that administrators, faculty, and the undergraduate students themselves focus too little attention on learning.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
This book is based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)—a project in which my coauthor Josipa Roksa and I followed several thousand students across 24 diverse U.S. four-year colleges and universities to investigate how much they improved on a state-of-the-art measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication.
When comparing the test scores taken after students had invested years of college studying to those taken at the time when they started college, we found that large numbers of students did not improve.
Surveying these same students on their college experiences revealed that they were in classes that placed few demands on them in terms of reading and writing requirements. The students also reported spending relatively few hours studying, and that they were often studying with their friends.
While we only measured the students’ general skills as opposed to subject-specific skills, we are skeptical that the results would be much different if another type of test was given—many of the students we followed did not appear particularly academically engaged with their coursework.
These students were largely academically adrift at these institutions, hence the title of the book.
We attribute this limited learning to the institutional cultures in the schools. Contemporary colleges accomplish many things, but our results suggest that administrators, faculty, and the undergraduate students themselves focus too little attention on learning.