[lit-ideas] Scary
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 01:40:30 EST
_http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060119/ap_on_go_ot/literacy_college_students;_yl
t=AnYr1xGCKaIypptV5dd9xScDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl_
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060119/ap_on_go_ot/literacy_college_students;_ylt=AnYr1x
GCKaIypptV5dd9xScDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl)
<<Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer Thu Jan 19, 6:23 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many
complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing
the
cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses,
the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of
their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75
percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy
tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood
pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card
offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a
survey about parental involvement in school.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and
other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for
checkbooks or restaurant tips.
"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree
and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the
study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and
social science research organization.
Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate
skills, meaning they could perform moderately challenging tasks. Examples
include identifying a location on a map, calculating the cost of ordering
office supplies or consulting a reference guide to figure out which foods
contain
a particular vitamin.>>
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