Margaret Austin Smith - Undergrads May Fail Critical-Thinking Test, but Academia Is Failing Them
May 3, 2012 The two professors sat in front of me, making conversation before the talk. The speaker's title slide already projected on the wall ahead: "What (if anything) are undergraduates learning during college?" The professors laughed at just how apt they thought the title was: "Isn't that right?" "Yes, anything, please!" And then the more senior faculty member, a woman, returned with a comment that made her junior colleague bristle: "Especially the boys. Some of those boys just try to get by with the minimum possible." The junior colleague sat silent, and then spoke with a sharpness that spiked into the buoyant mood of moments before: "Well, that was me in high school. But the thing is, I was just bored to tears." His senior colleague stopped chuckling to nod knowingly.
The slides belonged to Josipa Roksa, a co-author with Richard Arum of the 2011 sociology/media sensation "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" and of its 2012 follow-up report, "Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort."The premise of the talk, as well as the premise of the book and its sequel, was that undergraduate students are not improving their critical thinking skills in college, that this claim is sustained by the failure of a putatively representative sample of 2,362 students at 24 four-year institutions to increase their average score on standardized tests of critical thinking, and that this failure in critical thinking is affecting them negatively in the labor market and in civil society (as indicated by the percentage with full-time employment or graduate or professional school status, and by self-reported newspaper-reading habits).
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