Academically Adrift

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa

Discussion by George Pullman

This book is getting a great deal of press and it is certainly worth reading and talking about. If fact, we are planning to gather a group of faculty from across campus for a 2 session discussion of the topics and questions raised by Arum and Roksa. If you don't have time to read the book, the authors provide a great summary here. We are particularly gratified to see capstone courses and portfolios mentioned positively. For a sense of what Academically Adrift is about, have a look at the quotations below. Again, apologies for the absence of page numbers. Kindle app glitch.

• "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 our study."
• "While they may be acquiring subject-specific knowledge or greater self-awareness on their journeys through college, many students are not improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Evidence of limited learning and persistent inequality should give pause to the recent emphasis on “college for all” policies."
• "Fifty percent of students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one-third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week."
• "If students are not being asked by their professors to read and write on a regular basis in their coursework, it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks—such as the CLA—that involve critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing."
• "Students are taking courses without significant reading and writing requirements, it is probably unreasonable to expect them to develop skills to improve on performance tasks that require critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication."
• "Having faculty members who are perceived by students as being approachable and having high standards and expectations is associated with greater learning."
• "The combination of reading and writing in coursework was necessary to improve students’ performance on tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in their first two years of college."
• "If we select top-performing institutions—institutions that show much larger gains on the CLA than others, net of individual characteristics— we find, not surprisingly, that their students report higher incidence of behaviors that are beneficial for learning (figure 4.8).61 Students at these institutions report greater course requirements: almost two-thirds (62 percent) of their students reported taking courses that required both reading more than forty pages a week"
• "Among other characteristics, these institutions had an “unshakeable focus on student learning.” Their emphasis on undergraduate learning was manifested in a range of practices, from institutional openness to new and experimental instructional techniques to faculty investing more time in students and taking greater responsibility for them, as well as showing greater commitment to both providing and receiving feedback."
• "When students report that they have taken a class in which they had to read more than forty pages a week and write more than twenty pages over the course of a semester, they also report spending more time studying: more than two additional hours per week than students who do not have to meet such requirements."
• "Faculty throughout the higher-education system have learned that research productivity is rewarded not just with increased salary, but often with reduced course loads—and they have come to believe that to the extent that undergraduate instruction matters at all in these institutions, it is assessed primarily in terms of student satisfaction on course evaluations."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, for example, urges all institutions to develop “ambitious, specific, and clearly stated goals for student learning” and to “gather evidence about how well students in various programs are achieving learning goals."
• "Association of American Colleges and Universities, for example, has noted that “capstone courses and portfolios provide promising anchors for a meaningful approach to educational accountability."