You can lead a student to knowledge, according to an old academic saying, but you can’t make him or her think.
I recently wrote about the possibility of testing and certification for what I called a “college-level GED.” Like the current GED test for high school equivalency, it would award certification to bright, hardworking job applicants who want to show potential employers how much they know, even though they never graduated from college.
I heard from a number of readers who supported the idea. Some were eager to take the test now, if they could. But the most thoughtful question I received went like this: What about the “critical thinking” skills that we traditionally expect campus academic life to teach and encourage?
I agree. Critical thinking is the brain’s investigative reporter. It questions assumptions and requires more than the memory to pass most standardized tests.
But we do have tests for that. For example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, launched in 2000, gives a 90-minute essay test to freshmen and seniors that aims to measure gains in critical thinking and communication skills.
However, recent studies of CLA results reveal another major problem, not so much in the testing of critical thinking as in how little critical thinking is being taught.
One new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, questions whether a large chunk of today’s college students are learning much on campus that they didn’t already know.
Following CLA results and other data for 2,300 students at 24 public and private colleges, Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.
That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: “I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.”
Among the jaw-dropping examples Levy related in her email to me and a later phone call was a senior who reacted with memorable resentment to a two-week take-home assignment to critically evaluate a scientific journal article.
The professor specifically requested a hard-eyed assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the article’s sources, methods and conclusions. She did not, repeat, not want students simply to summarize the contents. She stipulated that last part in capital letters.
Yet when the students returned their papers, she recalled, one offered nothing but what Levy said she didn’t want: “a content summary, without a single evaluative statement.” When the student complained about her zero grade, Levy explained the goose egg. The student argued back indignantly, “But that would have required THINKING!”
It was the winter quarter of her senior year, the young woman explained, and she could memorize as much as any professor gave her and earn As and Bs but, until this course, she had “never been required to think!”
“If students can get a degree from the University of Chicago without having either the will or capacity to think,” Levy said, “then it is certainly true of less selective universities and colleges.”
Read the rest here.
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