Earlier this year, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa created quite a stir with their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Their central claim: if the goal of college is to teach students how to think critically, then colleges are failing at their primary purpose.
With a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in the study. (36)
Academically Adrift is based on a 2005-07 study of 2,300 students using the College Learning Assessment (CLA) Longitudinal Project, with assessments taken at the beginning of their freshmen year and again midway through their sophomore year. Others are much better qualified than I am to critique the study, so I’m focusing on what I took away from the book as it relates to the Emerging Scholars Network. If you’d like to read more about the study from people in the field, here are a couple of places to start:
- Arum and Roksa’s op-ed in the NY Times
- Louis Menand’s long review in The New Yorker of Academically Adrift and In the Basement of the Ivory Tower by Professor X (not the mutant)
- Alexander Astin’s critique of the study in the Chronicle
- Kevin Carey’s short essay Who’s Going to Write the Next Academically Adrift?
- NPR’s story about the book
Have you read Academically Adrift? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this book.
If you have seen other good takes on Academically Adrift, please link to them in the comments. Without diving into the data too closely, here are four things that I learned from the book. [Read more…] about Four Things I Learned about Students and Faculty from Academically Adrift