Right Wing Nation

Last March, I blogged about a Chronicle of Higher Education survey that pointed up the disconnection between secondary and post-secondary faculty about how well students are prepared for the university. The survey found that respondents found that secondary and post-secondary faculty had very different ideas about how well students were prepared for the university:

Somewhat or very well prepared in writing:
Secondary	85%
Post-secondary	53%
Somewhat or very well prepared in reading:
Secondary	82%
Post-secondary	58%
Somewhat or very well prepared in research skills:
Secondary	79%
Post-secondary	46%

There was also a marked difference in workload:

Hours of work outside of class expected of students per week
	High-school teachers	College professors
6 or more	17%	48%
3 to 5	55%	46%
None to 2	28%	6%

I predicted the survey wouldn’t have an impact, because few secondary school faculty read the Chronicle, and I was correct. I saw this study mentioned only on university-related blogs. However, thanks to Ken DeRosa, I found this hot of the presses ACT study (did I ever mention how much I hate pdf files?) Ken says:

But aren’t college professors looking for creative students? Apparently, not.

It’s a university, not a performance art school.

What about math and science? Don’t college professors want students who can think outside the box and who have higher order thinking skills? Er, no.

We might feel a bit more disposed toward "higher order thinking skills" if students could write in grammatical sentences and knew without reaching for a calculator that two and two are four. But let’s turn to the study. First, preparedness in general:

While most high school teachers across subject areas believe that meeting their state’s standards prepares students for college-level work, most postsecondary instructors disagree.

[ . . . ]

High school teachers believe states prepare students well for college-level work; however, roughly 65 percent of postsecondary instructors responded that their state’s standards prepared students poorly or very poorly for college-level work in English/writing, reading, and science.

Here are the results by field:

How well do you think your state’s standards prepare students for high school-level work in your content area?
Middle School/Junior High School
	Very poorly %	Poorly %	Well %	Very well %
Writing	3	8	60	29
Reading	2	5	65	29
Math	1	8	67	24
Science	1	12	68	19
High School
	Very poorly %	Poorly %	Well %	Very well %
Writing	3	20	60	16
Reading	3	25	57	15
Math	4	17	64	15
Biology	4	20	63	13
Chemistry	7	34	51	9
Earth Science	4	20	65	12
Physics	7	33	54	7
All Science Combined	5	27	57	10
Post-secondary
	Very poorly %	Poorly %	Well %	Very well %
Writing	13	55	29	4
Reading	11	52	33	3
Math	11	47	38	4
Biology	17	47	31	5
Chemistry	13	57	27	3
Earth Science	20	52	26	2
Physics	17	49	32	1
All Science Combined	17	52	29	3

So what are the differences between these perceptions? First, generally:

What postsecondary instructors expect entering college students to know is far more targeted and specific than what high school teachers view as important.

Exactly. Secondary (and probably primary and middle) school curricula are too broad and too shallow. The philosophy seems to be, "Cover a lot of topics, but never to any depth." Interestingly:

Remedial-course teachers’ ratings of mathematics and reading skills tend to align more closely with those of postsecondary instructors than with those of high school teachers.

I’ll leave the possible reasons for that as an exercise for the reader.

The specific differences:

There are specific differences between high school instruction and postsecondary expectations in every major curriculum area.

[ . . . ]

English/Writing:
High School: Focus on Idea Development
Postsecondary: Focus on Writing Mechanics

I could rant and rave about how students can’t write a grammatical sentence, don’t know what a paragraph is, construct a thesis statement, or argue their way out of a paper bag, but if you’ve spent any time around any faculty lounge at your nearest university, you’ve already heard all about that. It’s one of those topics that comes up at least ten or fifteen times every week–every time somebody is grading papers or essay questions. And it’s not only that. They don’t have the grammatical knowledge to understand what you’re talking about when you try to help them write coherent, grammatical English. Try telling a student, "This is a run-on sentence," or "This is a comma splice," or "You have to use a colon here, and not a semicolon," or "Your subject-verb agreement is wrong," and behold the deer-in-the-headlights look you get. Students don’t know what a proper noun is, so pointing out that something should be capitalized because it’s a proper noun is a lesson lost on them.

Process writing certainly has its pedagogical advantages, but that doesn’t mean you should drop editing and revision from the process.

And math?

Mathematics:
High School: Focus on Advanced Mathematics Content
Postsecondary: Focus on Developing a More Rigorous Understanding of Fundamentals

Look, it would be nice if I had a class of incoming students who already knew what Chi-square, ANOVA, t-test, regression, binomial distribution, and so forth were, knew how to do them, and when, but they can’t add. They don’t have the basic arithmetic fluency to be able to set up and solve a problem. They don’t know that they can’t divide by zero. They don’t understand the relationship between multiplication and division. Forget Chi-square. Give us students who are arithmetically fluent, please!

And science?

Science:
High School: Focus on Science Content
Postsecondary: Focus on Process and Inquiry Skills in Science

Here, we’re putting reading and math together, because the above isn’t just science. It’s also how to set up and carry out research, then write a research paper. Students do not understand the thought process of first constructing a hypothesis, then constructing the study to oppose their hypothesis to the null hypothesis. Students do not understand that the study must be clear in their minds before they gather data, and they don’t understand the process of gathering data. And even if they get through that, students don’t know how to develop their ideas and construct a logical argument with evidentiary proofs.

Then, there’s reading:

The survey results indicate a general lack of reading courses in high school and a decline in the teaching of targeted reading strategies after ninth grade. Meanwhile, remedial-course teachers rate such strategies as being of high importance and devote a large percentage of time to teaching them in order to get their students ready for entry-level college coursework. These findings suggest that more instruction in reading and reading strategies—including reading texts with greater complexity across the curriculum—is needed throughout the high school years. All courses in high school, not just English and social studies but mathematics and science as well, must challenge students to read and understand complex texts.

[ . . . ]

Meanwhile, analysis of the responses indicates that English language arts teachers overall did not tend to rate reading in other content areas as highly as they did language arts–based reading activities.

There’s nothing new about that, and certainly nothing specific to the secondary schools. For many years, university faculty complained that the English department freshman composition classes taught students nothing useful to non-English classes. That’s why so many English departments had freshman composition torn away from them and given to WAC (writing across the curriculum) and WID (writing in the discipline) programs. And from most of the composition teachers I’ve known, I suspect the reason they do nothing but write personal essays and position papers about their feelings or opinions is that the composition faculty don’t know anything about writing anything else.

But look at this:

% Teachers who do not teach reading or understanding of:
Grade	Social science texts	Natural science texts
9th	60%	93%
10th	62%	88%
11th	22%	94%
12th	52%	96%

Yes, Virginia, everybody at the university wishes students were better able to evaluate evidence and critique arguments, not to mention read the articles we assign in depth. And yes, of course, high school students should be reading literature–I’m the last person on the planet who would argue against that. But currently, the first academic writing students see is when they come to the university–and it isn’t pretty (neither the writing, nor how students react to having to read it). And the same can be said for writing. We care about what they think and why. We care about their logical argumentation. And although it may sound insensitive, we don’t care about how they feel or what their opinons are. Can we please have at least a few students who don’t have to have the difference between fact and opinion explained to them?

But let’s go back to math (you knew I would). Unsurprisingly, post-secondary respondents rated basic arithmetic operations as more important than secondary respondents. Also unsurprisingly, secondary respondents rated statistics far higher (3.01 on a 1-5 scale of least to most important) than did post-secondary respondents (1.91 on the same scale). In fact, the only one of the identified math skills rated more important by post-secondary than secondary respondents was basic arithmetic operations.

This study points up what I’ve been saying repeatedly for a long time now, and let us hope that because it is an ACT study, and not just a Chronicle study, that somebody in the educracy will pay attention. The primary and secondary school curricula are broken because the educrats have a twisted sense of priorities. Let us worry about their creativity and higher order thinking–that’s what the university is for. You worry about the basic knowledge (you know, as in facts) and basic skills (you know, as in writing a grammatical sentence or knowing that two plus two is four)–that’s what the primary and secondary schools are for. And while you’re at it–and I’m speaking primarily to you teachers in the secondary schools–start weaning your students off the teat. Freshmen are too needy, and want constant hand holding. There’s not much that can be called "supportive" about the university, and students need to be ready to deal with it when they get there.

Other education articles are here.

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