[lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

[Carrol Cox]

[Preliminary: Understand that my reading level has  become very  low. I have
only been able to rea a selection of these posts, & most of them that I have
read I have not read very completely. Hence I almost certainly will
misconstrue some of the posts I respond to, and probably already have. My
eyesight has deteriorated seriously in the last few months, and I now must
expand the font so much that I see only a few words on a line. For example,
"seriously in the la" fills the screen from edge to edge, and I get only 4
or 5 lines on the screen at once. I am getting better at listening to
ZoomText read it, but that is not my 'accustome' way of taking in a text and
for now anyhow gives uncertain comprehension. I think my difficulties, which
are not due to illiteracy or cognitive skills are relevant to this thread.]

Is the assumption here that better instruction would lead to 100%
performance by all students on the reading tests? And if that is not the
assumption, what is the basis on which these results are found
unsatisgfactory.

 A re some sizeable sector of the  population incapable of achieving the
reading skill they "should" achieve? Why?

I really cannot see why the test results are disturbint. What do people want
and why do they want it? 

I'm not satisfied with my formulation of these questions, but I'm going to
keep coming back with variations of them until I am satisfied.

I will say this: Anyone who has not formulatged these questions for
him/herself is being stupid. The mere figures have no meaning until they are
analyzed within a clear frame that defines significance.

I am beginning, from trying to make sense of this thread, to get a glimpse
of what Marx meant when he wrote that abstraction was the method for
studying social questions. But there have been no abstractions arrived at in
this thread, and the lack of  careful abstraction leads to mere stuttering.
Empirical generalizations are NOT abstractions, merely preliminary data, and
have, in themselves, no intelligible content. In other words, the statement
that  X% of a population cannot read critically does not constitute
knowledge of anything. It has no meaning until placed in the proper
theoretical or abstract context. That has not been done in this thread,
which is why it seems to me to be mere stuttering.

Carrol