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Are They Really Adrift?
I've been following with dismay the reports that students learn little in college. Academically Adrift and Pascarella et al. to the contrary, anyone who has taught the same students as freshmen and seniors knows that most learn and grow during their undergraduate years. So something has to be wrong with the research that shows little or no gain. And in fact, quite a few things may be wrong with it.
In the first place, it's not clear that the tests get at more than a few things that might be learned in college (Pascarella knows this). Both the CAAP-CT and the CLA test “critical thinking”—basically, the analysis of arguments and the use of evidence in supporting them. These are valuable skills indeed, but it's not known to what extent they exist in a general form, rather than embedded in a particular subject-matter. A student of biology might have improved greatly in critiquing reports of experimental results, while not improving in dealing with the general topics of the tests used by Arum and Roksa or Pascarella et al. Moreover, analysis of arguments is only part of what anyone might learn in college. I remember answering a freshman placement-test question about the uniformity of human nature: I used Shakespeare as witness that human nature is one and unchanging. Two years later, I cringed to think how confined in space and time my conception of human nature had been. I don't think either the CAAP or CLA would reveal any such development.
In the second place, one must always question the motivation of students taking the second administration of a no-stakes test. Typically, students in freshman orientation or the first few weeks of school take such tests more seriously than do upperclassmen. There's a large amount of literature on the problem of getting those students to put their best efforts forward.
Additionally, the learning curve for the CAAP-CLA skills is not known. We had some evidence at Fredonia to show that better-prepared students improve more slowly and that there may be a ceiling. At a selective private college in the West, the freshman class ceilinged-out on the CLA two years ago.
Moreover, full exercise of the tested skills might require more time than either test allows. English teachers encourage their students to draft and redraft, to let a text lie fallow for a few days and then review its arguments yet again. While many of the students tested might have done better with more time, time limits might especially affect upperclassmen who have learned to consider more possibilities in an argument. It's usually the poorest students who leave the examination early.
So the case is far from proved that students learn little in college. Granted that literacy is endangered in our country at every level, and granted that too many college courses require too little writing and certainly could be more demanding (why this is so is a whole different discussion), nevertheless, to argue that higher education is failing its students is a far leap from the evidence.
-Minda Rae Amiran
SUNY Fredonia
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