CNN.com - Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks - Jan 20, 2006
Latest study by the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that College students lack literacy for complex tasks:
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.
There are some bright spots:
…compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents. “But do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no,” said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.
I see the problem as two fold. Students see that technology can handle most of the mundane tasks, so they don’t need to estimate when they’ll run out of gas, the onboard car computer tells them that they have 23 miles to empty. The other problem is that students think that since they can find any piece of esoteric information on the Internet, they don’t really need to be able to remember facts. This manifests itself when students are presented with a question where the answer is not on a web page.
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