Monday - January 23, 2006

Math is Hard

Saw this on Kim’s site and had to pass it along.

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Let’s see a show of hand of how many of you have been frustrated with the chore of handing a cashier bills and change (so you could get back more usable change) only to see the blank stare of a brook trout while said cashier pondered the significance of what you just did?

But it only gets better.

“This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don’t do it,” Finney said (Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.)

No, Joni, it says that our government education system is a collosal failure.

Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.

The survey showed a strong relationship between analytic coursework and literacy. Students in two-year and four-year schools scored higher when they took classes that challenged them to apply theories to practical problems or weigh competing arguments

Go figure.  When you actually ask the young skulls of much to figure something out (as opposed to just asking for the answer) they actually learn a valuable skill.  Whoda thunk it?

_{*for those who don’t get the headline, see here.}

Posted by Drew458     on 01/23/2006 at 11:52 AM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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