It is such a wonderful thing to see that students majoring in liberal arts fields do far better at the moment but a little surprising (snark) that the authors appear to have failed to bring any of the regularly published and easily accessible insights from the social sciences and humanities about the structural priorities and cultural contradictions of the neoloberal corporatization of (at least) public higher education - in terms of both administrative desires for teaching instrumental job skills as part of a desire that universities serve as centers for the promotion of regional growth AND in terms of student resistance to the hard work, historical perspective, comparative analysis, and social self-reflexivity that grounds engaged critical thinking - to bear on their study. It can't possibly be that administrations are advancing agendas which simultaneously reinforce educational instrumentality AND critical thinking while also increasingly prioritizing student evaluations when it comes to their panopticonic efforts to discipline - oh, did I say discipline? I meant foster excellence within their - faculty.
I guess, the obvious conclusion of the study must have been that - since the reward for doing a good job is shifting of resources towards excellence and the punishment fo doing a bad job is losing resources - the only thing to do is increase support for the liberal arts end of the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities because it is only by reducing their funding that the incompetence of professional and applied programs can be resolved since reducing their faculty lines and other forms of support will stimulate innovation and creativity such that they will start demanding more liberal learning from their students, their students will start doing better and - after that - they can be rewarded for their efforts (unless they don't improve, at which point the majors will simply have to be eliminated, the departments disbanded and tenured faculty in those departments sent packing.) The evidence is actually overwhelming at this point, since the reductions in proportional and per-student funding to the liberal arts programs at many universities and colleges has stimulated such excellent work over the last few decades, it is time to reward that excellent with more tenure lines, greater numbers of teaching assistants, and more infrastructural resources - from IT, to labs, to library materials and so on. It must all ne just around the corner...
On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 26, 2011, at 8:44 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> > Not much, it seems.
>
> <
> http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much
> >
>
> The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to
> the authors, is a lack of rigor. They review data from student surveys to
> show, for example, that 32 percent of students each semester do not take any
> courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half
> don't take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over
> the course of a semester. Further, the authors note that students spend, on
> average, only about 12-14 hours a week studying, and that much of this time
> is studying in groups.
>
> The research then goes on to find a direct relationship between rigor and
> gains in learning:
>
> • Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain
> more knowledge -- while those who spend more time studying in peer groups
> see diminishing gains.
> • Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40
> pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained
> more than other students.
> • Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show
> smaller gains than other students.
> • Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities
> (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or
> losses in learning.
> • Students majoring in liberal arts fields see "significantly higher
> gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time
> than students in other fields of study." Students majoring in business,
> education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The
> authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading
> and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the
> substance of the material.)
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319