Reply #100: I did a lot of reading beyond the original article [View All]

[caraher]

In a sense yes, this is nothing new, but it's measurably worse. To the extent that the assessments they used are valid measures of critical thinking, similar research in the '80s showed students gains in the same skills as about double current gains over four years. At the same time, students today report spending about half as much time studying outside of class as they did then.

I'm also astounded at how low the bar is, in this work, for a "reading-intensive" or "writing-intensive" course - and that students are able not only to find courses that are neither, but actually construct college careers primarily out of such classes. "Reading intensive" is 40 pages per week or more reading; "writing intensive" is 20 or more pages of student writing per semester. I don't think I've ever taught a course that's not reading intensive by this standard, and I teach physics - not a field one traditionally thinks of as chock-full of reading-intensive courses! Heck, I was assigning 30 pages a night to my seminar (90 pages a week).