NY Times' Blog Addresses How Much Students Are Learning

The New York Times blog "The Choice" is usually about the college admissions process, but this week they are addressing the results of a study in which 2300 first-and-second-year college students were followed by researchers. The title of the book that the two head researchers wrote about the study says a lot about their results.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (and a shorter report of the same study) found that 45 percent of the students they followed "demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications."

Problems identified by the researchers are that students are not taking classes that require them to do significant amounts of reading and writing and that universities have lost their focus on undergraduate learning and have become "distracted by other institutional functions and goals."

Yahoo News also posted the Associated Press' writeup of this study.