Thursday, March 13, 2008

The "Failing Our Students, Failing America" report

A couple weeks ago we blogged that USA Today reports that Teens losing touch with historical references. Robert M. Lindsey left a comment encouraging us to check out the Civic Literacy Report. I had seen commentary on it back in November and even took the Civic Literacy test.

The report is very condemning of the job higher education does in teaching students about American History. From the summary are these major findings:

1: College Seniors Failed a Basic Test on America’s History and Institutions.
2: Colleges Stall Student Learning about America.
3: America’s Most Prestigious Universities Performed the Worst.
4: Inadequate College Curriculum Contributes to Failure.
5: Greater Learning about America Goes Hand-in-Hand with More Active Citizenship.

There were three additional finds:

1: Higher Quality Family Life Contributes to More Learning about America.
2: American Colleges Under-Serve Minority Students.
3: American Colleges Don’t Teach Their Foreign Students about America.

If you have a child about to head off to college, you might find the report helpful in selecting a university which will really teach your children, instead of just taking your money.


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1 comment:

Fred Ross said...

It's very important to ask what a given test is measuring and to calibrate it against known populations. After looking over it, I wouldn't attempt to interpret the numbers it produces except in cases of extreme outliers: scores close to perfect or to zero.