Real critical thinking and and what passes for it in university

From The Economic Price of Colleges’ Failures by Kevin Carey. The researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa who brought us Academically Adrift (AA), are back with a new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift (AAA). In AA they argued with evidence that

Colleges promise to teach these broad intellectual skills [critical thinking, analytic reasoning and communications skills measured by CLA] to all students, regardless of major. The students took the C.L.A. again at the end of their senior year. On average, they improved less than half of one standard deviation. For many, the results were much worse. One-third improved by less than a single point on a 100-point scale during four years of college.

Arum and Roksa are observing. Certainly universities are partly to blame but the individual students are as well.

The nature of the collegiate academic experience mattered, too. Students who spent more time studying alone learned more, even after controlling for their sociodemographic background, high school grades and entrance exam scores. So did students whose teachers enforced high academic expectations. People who studied the traditional liberal arts and sciences learned more than business, education and communications majors.

Yet despite working little and learning less — a third of students reported studying less than five hours a week and half were assigned no long papers to write — most continued to receive good grades. Students did what colleges asked of them, and for many, that wasn’t very much.

Emphasis added. I keep seeing "expectations" come up as a real factor in outcomes when all other factors are controlled. I suspect we'll be seeing more focus in the research on the role that expectations carry.

Ahh, but you can't measure critical thinking some critics say. Say's you say Arum and Roksa.

“Academically Adrift” called into question what college students were actually getting for their increasingly expensive educations. But some critics questioned whether collegiate learning could really be measured by a single test. Critical thinking skills are, moreover, only a means to an end. The end itself is making a successful transition to adulthood: getting a good job, finding a partner, engaging with society. The follow-up study, “Aspiring Adults Adrift,” found that, in fact, the skills measured by the C.L.A. make a significant difference when it comes to finding and keeping that crucial first job.

Here are the results indicating that CLA does in fact have real predictive power.

Even after statistically controlling for students’ sociodemographic characteristics, college majors and college selectivity, those who finished school with high C.L.A. scores were significantly less likely to be unemployed than those who had low C.L.A. scores. The difference was even larger when it came to success in the workplace. Low-C.L.A. graduates were twice as likely as high-C.L.A. graduates to lose their jobs between 2010 and 2011, suggesting that employers can tell who got a good college education and who didn’t. Low-C.L.A. graduates were also 50 percent more likely to end up in an unskilled occupation, and were less likely to be satisfied with their jobs.

It has long been remarked that on international testing platforms such as PISA, American students are irrepressibly (naively) optimistic and overconfident - they think they scored better than they actually do and they are much more confident in their misestimate than students in other countries. This shows up in Arum and Roksa's results.

Remarkably, the students had almost no awareness of this dynamic. When asked during their senior year in 2009, three-quarters reported gaining high levels of critical thinking skills in college, despite strong C.L.A. evidence to the contrary. When asked again two years later, nearly half reported even higher levels of learning in college. This was true across the spectrum of students, including those who had struggled to find and keep good jobs.

Why?

Through diplomas, increasingly inflated grades and the drumbeat of college self-promotion, these students had been told they had received a great education. The fact that the typical student spent three times as much time socializing and recreating in college as studying and going to class didn’t change that belief. Nor did unsteady employment outcomes and, for the large majority of those surveyed, continued financial dependence on their parents.

Students who were interviewed in depth by Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa put great stock in collegiate social experiences that often came at the expense of academic work, emphasizing the value of the personal relationships they built. But only 20 percent found their most recent job through personal contacts, and of those, less than half came from college friends. And while the recent graduates were gloomy about the state of the nation, they professed strong belief in their own future success. The vast majority thought their lives would be better than that of their parents. “They learned from the experts that they can do well with little effort,” Mr. Arum told me, “so they’re optimistic.”

We need to transmit values and behaviors (mostly occurs within the structure of the family) and knowledge, experiences, and skills (most occurs within the education system). We are simultaneously seeing the fracturing of families (single parent families) and the reduction in educational effectiveness. Lots that can and should be done to address these issues but they are fraught and wholly incompatible with the ethos of the academy and the MSM.

With blogs and twitter and the internet and social media, we are getting more and more connectivity among people and their ideas. This is broadly a good thing even though there is all sorts of heat arising from absence of good manners. But the dearth of knowledge (context) and the scarcity of critical thinking are really big contributors to the noise in the system. Hopefully this is simply a way station on the journey of systemic evolution. That greater connectivity will ultimately lead to people displaying better manners, seeking more complete knowledge before opining and exercising greater real critical thinking (rather than what they mistook for critical thinking in college).