There’s more than enough blame to go around on the K-16 continuum, and not just blame that traditional colleges and universities deserve. Quite frankly, most college students should have developed critical thinking skills long before they’ve even applied to a given college or university. These are skills that our middle schools and high schools should be helping them develop, with college rounding this development out. Instead, between cut budgets, high-stakes testing, and a national atmosphere in which critical thinking is criticized, most K-12 students have never applied critical thinking in any of education. To expect professors — most of whom aren’t trained teachers — to fix this by making the college years MORE rigorous is asking for a higher college dropout rate. No student learns anything in terms of critical thinking by being a college drop out.
But that isn’t all that’s wrong here. The study itself is flawed by assuming that more reading and more writing = more critical thinking. Critical thinking, or the ability to thinking independently based on a variety of evidence, perspectives, and inductive and deductive reasoning from such is also about quality. Professors can triple the amount of reading and writing that students do, and it won’t make a dent in this swimming-upstream-issue. And only 24 schools out of 3,100 colleges and universities for this study? Come on! This isn’t even close to a representative sample.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Notes from a Boy @ The Window 