INTRODUCTION:  Agreement vs. Clarity This section is about having clarity as to what is expected of the student and instructor Related link:  Who's to Blame?   College Students Lack Critical Thinking Skills, But Who’s To Blame? Doug Mataconis   ·   Tuesday, January 18, 2011 http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/college-students-lack-critical-thinking-skills-but-whos-to-blame/ A new study suggests that American universities are failing in what is supposed to be one of the their core missions: NEW YORK — An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education. Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin. Arum, whose book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective. Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called “higher order” thinking skills. Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities. The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups. Perhaps most the most interesting thing about the study is the manner in which the results seem skewed by field of study: Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills. Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don’t preclude the possibility that such students “are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills.” Greater gains in liberal arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study’s authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages a week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning. That’s welcome news to liberal arts advocates. I would think it would be, but on some level such an analysis would seem to ignore the reasons that students go to college today. Unlike in the past, when a college education was viewed as an opportunity for learning, there seems to be more of a focus today on learning skills that will lead to a high rate of monetary return after college. Majoring in history or political science may help you to learn to think critically, and that is a skill that is valuable in fields like medicine and law, but it’s unlikely to lead to the same level of monetary reward as someone who pursues, say, a Masters In Business Administration. On some level, colleges have become vocational school almost as much as they are “institutions of higher learning.” I’m not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing, but it’s the world that we live in and it’s unlikely to change. Ann Althouse, who teaches law at the University of Wisconsin, wonders why the study concentrates so much on the students and not the professors: I’d like a study analyzing whether the professors know how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument, and objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event. It strikes me as a fair point considering that it is sort of difficult to teach someone a skill you don’t possess yourself. Another blogger points out that this isn’t just an indictment of college education in the U.S.: By the time our kids get to college it is too late to change habits or learn new skills that should have been taught to them in grade k-12 in my opinion. This study does not merely condemn colleges, it throws a harsh light on our primary education system on this country. In general, the US doesn’t pay our teachers well (compared to other professions and other nations), nor do we reward them for excellence, nor do we often provide them with a system that accurately assesses their efforts (i.e., No child left behind ring any bells?). This is a fair point. Students do not walk into college blank slates, but as products of the education they received for twelve years before that. If colleges are failing at their primary mission, it isn’t necessarily their fault.     INATTENTION BLINDNESS.  Original online source: http://pedleysmiths.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/attention-%e2%80%93-breach-of-duty-as-a-student/ Now think about this in the context of learning, if you are in a classroom or any other learning environment for that matter and you move your attention from the classroom to another event, a text or email perhaps, then although you are in the room you have put your attention elsewhere.  Yes you can hear what is going on and yes if someone called your name you could respond all be it slowly, but would your ability to learn and recall the facts from the lecture be as good, somehow I think not.  This is not to say that periodically you should not let your concentration drift as you begin to think about coffee or what you want to do at the weekend, this is a perfectly natural and in some instances a necessary form of relaxation that can help with learning. This is about being engaged, giving The Event your full attention. Think of your attention as a single beam of light, able to shine on only on one thing at a time, it illuminates and makes clear that one thing but when you move the light what you were looking at becomes dark or at best not as clear, something in your periphery. And so to the point, when you have an opportunity to learn, attend a lecture or meeting, give it your full attention. You are not being efficient by doing two things at once you are in fact only ever doing one. So if you do have two things to do but only time to do one, look carefully at what they are and prioritize. And if the email is more important give it all your attention and only after you have dealt with it come to class or attend the meeting. One other point, you do not become invisible when on your mobile, everyone can see that you have your shoulders slumped in the so called “Blackberry prayer”. Now you might think that this sends a very clear message as to how busy and important you are, in fact it does the complete opposite. People think that you are not in control, probably fire fighting, a poor delegator and a poor manager. And yes it’s rude……" There's been a lot of talk lately about whether digital culture is changing the way we think and interact.  There is certainly an upside to this technology, but every strength brings its own weakness (every positive is a negative, etc.).  Some emphasize the positive (e.g., Newsweek magazine), but here is one--not so positive--appraisal. iPhones Have Consequences by Sally Thomas Excerpted from online source: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6370  . . . The project of Emory professor Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, is to confront and dismantle the claim that digital technology is producing a higher-powered, better-informed, all-around smarter new generation than, say, the .01 percent of the Facebook population born in the 1960s.   Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/google "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." Bauerlein recognizes that we live in a world where anyone with online access can read the Bill of Rights, dissect a virtual frog, take an online math quiz, tour the Metropolitan Museum of Art, watch a 1959 film of the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Franz Schubert’s Erlking, and read Plato’s Crito, any time of the day or night, for free. But he also asks why, with all these advantages, so many young Americans sound like the high-school student who called a talk-radio show to complain about “all the boring stuff the teachers assign,” like “that book about the guy. [Pause] You know, that guy who was great.” “You mean The Great Gatsby?” asked the host. “Yeah,” said the caller. “Who wants to read about him?” The cultural candy shop is open as it’s never been open before, but evidence suggests that the kids aren’t buying. Bauerlein offers exhaustive statistics that point to steep drop-offs in reading habits and general knowledge over the last twenty-five years. In the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old demographic, for example, literary reader rates have declined by 17 percentage points since 1982. This, says Bauerlein, “isn’t just a youth trend. It’s an upheaval. The slide equals a 28 percent rate of decline, which cannot be interpreted as a temporary shift or as a typical drift in the ebb and flow of the leisure habits of youth. If all adults in the United States followed the same pattern, literary culture would collapse.” It would be easier to dismiss Bauerlein’s claims as mere reactionary hysteria if the collapse were not already so evident. He quotes interviewees, from the “Jaywalking” segment of The Tonight Show, who don’t know where the pope lives (“England?”) or the tenure of a Supreme Court justice (“I’m guessing four years?”), or the title of any classic work of literature. Their ignorance would seem outrageous if it didn’t sound just like the kind of thing my college-professor husband has been reading in student papers, hearing in conversations with students, and seeing in course evaluations for years. This is a 100-level course, and we shouldn’t be expected to do such complex reading, griped an entire chorus of students from a world-religions 101 course, for which the core text was a trade paperback that my husband’s father, a college dropout, had once been assigned in a Sunday School class. In another religion class, a student paper referred repeatedly to something called the momentous island, a phrase that mystified my husband until he realized that what the writer meant was that infamous school-prayer compromise, the moment of silence. At the prep school I attended, “where girls prepare to be tomorrow’s leaders today” and where every middle-school student now receives a school-issue laptop computer, ninth-graders no longer read The Once and Future King, because it’s “too long.” My eighth-grade English teacher, a patrician Southern lady of pronounced opinions, used to say, “My dears, you are not stupid. You are merely ignorant. And do you know why you are ignorant?” No, we really didn’t, but we were going to hear it anyway: “You are ignorant because you watch the idiot machine.” This was thirty years ago, when there was only one idiot machine. Television, vehicle of Masterpiece Theatre and Match Game ’74, has now been joined by a whole Information Superhighway, with a seemingly infinite number of exits to places that might be, but too often are not, Project Gutenberg’s collection of electronic texts. Rather than connecting the new generation with the thought and achievements of previous generations, the Web, says Bauerlein, “encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age. . . . It provides new and enhanced ways for adolescents to do what they’ve always done in a prosperous time: talk to, act like, think like, compete against, and play with one another,” nowadays in a hermetically sealed, youth-culture cyber-bubble. To get an account on Facebook—as, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that both my teenage daughter and I have done—is to enter a world in which people spend hours not only chatting but pretending to be werewolves who deliver bowls of pain to each other, or pretending to be pioneers on the Oregon trail who eat each other, or pretending to be superheroes who make each other levitate. In such pursuits can an entire afternoon evaporate while the sentences sit undiagrammed, the history chapter unread, the magazine article unwritten. The Crito is out there, too, among the werewolves and the cannibals, but Socrates sits in his prison in vain: The youth of Athens are busy finding out what breakfast food is preferred by boy bands such as the Jonas Brothers. The real outcome of Internet technology, argues Bauerlein, is not that it makes high culture readily available but that it usurps high culture’s place altogether. As one college student says, half-apologetically, “My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind of took the place of that.” An Apple Store window display features a row of gleaming laptop computers and a sign proclaiming, “The Only Books You’ll Ever Need.” Not, as Bauerlein points out, “The Only Computers.” Not “The Best Computers.” In the digital age, the Apples have trumped the oranges and rendered them obsolete, and already Johnny can’t remember what an orange tastes like. While apologists for digital technology in the classroom trumpet computer smarts as an entirely new form of intelligence, an “e-literacy revolution,” Bauerlein offers page after page of studies that suggest e-literacy is merely newspeak for illiteracy. If students visiting interactive sites and playing video games develop, as the claim goes, “the kinds of higher-order thinking and decision-making skills employers seek today,” these skills come at the cost of time spent reading, digesting, and retaining hard knowledge. In fact, says Bauerlein, the average person’s “screen reading, surfing, and searching habits . . . mark an obdurate resistance to certain lower-order and higher-order thinking skills [including] the capacity to read carefully and to cogitate analytically.” Contrary to claims that computer use enhances functional literacy, Bauerlein cites research suggesting that screen time actually inhibits language acquisition by limiting exposure to complex or unfamiliar words. Even “software god” Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, dismisses the world of blogs and gaming as “encapsulated entertainment”—adding, “If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I’m competing with spending their time on this kind of crap.” So much for “digital intelligence,” says Bauerlein, if even technophiles recognize time spent at this generation’s idiot machines as largely wasted time. But are the machines themselves the villains in this story? Could technology, on its own, spawn an entire mindless culture of flirting, gossiping, photo-uploading, and virtual navel-gazing—all in service of flipping off the phonies out there who don’t get that every passing emotion experienced by Tarquin D. Pebbleface and set down in textspeak is, like, “wry and hilarious,” dude? If, as Bauerlein claims, “the genuine significance of the Web to a seventeen-year-old mind” is “not the universe of knowledge brought to their fingertips, but an instrument of non-stop peer contact”—well, how did we get here? The answer lies in the same dismal territory already traversed by Diana West in her recent book The Death of the Grownup: the wholesale abdication of adults, not only parents but teachers, in favor of adolescent self-government—a culture that nurtures its present at the expense of its past. At its heart, Bauerlein’s book is not about machines at all but about what he calls “The Betrayal of the Mentors.” Simply put, the educational and cultural establishments have sold out tradition and authority in favor of “collaborative-learning” models and objectives like “working with every young person’s sense of self.” The average teenager, not surprisingly, views himself not as a student in need of enlightenment but as a kind of automatic savant. “It is the nature of adolescents,” says Bauerlein, “to believe that authentic reality begins with themselves, and that what long preceded them is irrelevant.” But when the larger culture collaborates in this belief, the outcomes are, if not actually disastrous, at least depressing. Bauerlein notes that in a Time magazine cover story reporting on the “Twixter generation”— the demographic of twenty-two to thirty year-olds—“not one of the Twixter or youth observers mentions an idea that stirs them, a book that influenced them, a class that inspired them, or a mentor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or ideas or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, or politics a helpful undertaking.” From the professor of Renaissance literature who declares, “Look, I don’t care if everybody stops reading literature,” to the urban teenage artist proclaiming that he’s not trying to be “Picasso or Rembrandt or whoever else, you know,” the leap is short and damningly direct. If even the grownups believe that what they know is not worth knowing, then the grownups—“teachers, professors, writers, journalists, intellectuals, editors, librarians, and curators”—are more than complicit in the creation of an exclusive teenage universe where the news is always “Me and How I Feel Now.” The technology, it would seem, merely facilitates the assumption that this is all the news that’s fit to print. Ideas have consequences and, according to Bauerlein, the consequence of this particular idea will be the coming of age of successive generations who know less and less about the ideas that gave us Western civilization, and who therefore have less and less investment in its continuation. “Knowledge,” writes Bauerlein, “supplies a motivation that ordinary ambitions don’t.” The kind of knowledge of which he speaks isn’t the sort that makes a person rich, beautiful, or popular. “It merely,” he writes, “provides a civic good.” In other words, learning a little, a person might come not only to regard himself as a member of society but to regard that society as something worth preserving.   Why Joel Stein Is Not a Narcissist By Joel Stein Online source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890394,00.html One thing I've learned about me after a lot of Googling myself is that most of my sentences contain the words I, me and myself. So when I found out that Dr. Drew Pinsky had given a test to 200 celebrities to find out if they're more narcissistic than everyone else, I wanted to take the test too. And I wanted to print the results in a magazine. In the least surprising poll not conducted by USA Today, Pinsky proved that celebrities are indeed narcissistic, in his new book The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America. While the average American scores a 15.3 on the Narcissism Personality Inventory, a 40-question narcissism test long used by psychologists, celebrities averaged 17.84. Longtime stars and newbies scored similarly, which might lead you to conclude that fame doesn't turn people into narcissists — it just attracts them. The more a person's fame was the unintended by-product of a skill, like playing an instrument, the lower the score. Reality-show participants landed numbers you'd expect only from 2-year-olds and fascist dictators. Since what I do can be replicated by anyone with a blog, I expected a 41. But I got a 14. Which rocked the foundation of my identity. I'm a man who writes about himself for a living. A man who has never said no to an offer to appear on E!, who tried out for The Real World, who loves it when Gawker mocks him, who has a "Joel Stein" RSS feed tapped directly into his veins, who is writing about himself in the third person. I'm a man who called everyone he knows to brag about his low narcissism score. If I'm not a narcissist, who am I? When I ask Pinsky if, perhaps, the test doesn't work on people who unwittingly outsmart it with their genius-level IQ, he assures me that the narcissism test results were correct. Narcissists, it turns out, can't even fake humility through transparently self-deprecating jokes. So my desire to be in magazines and on TV and on the stage of your child's school play is not a problem. "If you were living in Greek times and decided you wanted to speak in front of the Athenian assembly, does that mean you're a narcissist or that you wanted to participate in the institution of the times?" Pinsky asks. I'm not sure, but I do know that he nailed my main reason for hoping someone discovers a time machine. I, it turns out, am just insanely egotistical — much like Pinsky, who scored a 16 on the narcissism test despite the fact that he has been on more VH1 shows than I have and has a photo of himself on his book jacket that is slightly bigger than the book itself. Egotism isn't considered a personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and it doesn't prevent relationships, as narcissism does. It simply means that in our conversation, neither of us got to finish his sentences. Part of the reason my score was normal is that the definition of normal has moved. "If we'd taken this study in 1850, we'd all be an 8 or a 9," says Pinsky. "The prevailing wisdom is that there's a steady trend toward narcissism over the past 150 years." In their new book, The Narcissism Epidemic, psychology professors Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell compare the growing psychological condition to obesity. The average college student's score has gone up 20% since 1983, and scores in the dangerous over-20 range have nearly doubled. "No one ever talks about how much they like history on MySpace. They talk about how hot they are," Twenge said. Then she said some other stuff, but unfortunately I stopped listening when she told me I was in the index of her book. Page 106. Check it out. Narcissism has probably been increasing since the Renaissance, picking up speed in the 1970s when Tom Wolfe coined the Me decade and Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism, then speeding into hyperdrive during the past few years. Both Twenge and Pinsky argue that the narcissism of celebrities is being mirrored in the culture by Americans who, like a child, mimic attention-getting star behavior by singing on YouTube, sexting photos, getting plastic surgery or naming their totally non-Hungarian son Laszlo Stein. But I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. There's a reason we tell our kids they're special and can do anything they want. A monolithic culture that puts a ceiling on personal expectations isn't very interesting. One that celebrates differences and self-expression tolerates not only diversity but also the opportunity for individual greatness. Sure, that means some selfishness and entitlement and a few Tila Tequilas, but it also means greater freedom. And it's a whole lot more entertaining. By the end of the year, I'm hoping to get up to a 15. Greater vs. Lesser Truth Opening thought: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,. but not their own facts.” ~Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The challenge for the historian is to locate the "greater truth" when confronted with multiple explanations of matters in history.  Greater truth is derived after analyzing various perspectives for how much--or how little--they tell us about the issue at hand.  While there can be outright lies, half-truths and several lesser truths, there is only one greater truth which is based on the preponderance of the evidence and logical reasoning. "Greater vs. Lesser Truth" is not intended to be an abstract concept but only a statement of how historians endeavor to do their job. Our pursuit of history should be about the pursuit of truth but this is not easy because the greater truth is not always apparent without doing some work.  When it comes to history (as in life), we rarely possess 100% of the truth on one side and zero on the other.  This concept of greater truth also empowers us to seek wisdom (i.e., valid generalizations).  This is consistent with our ongoing goal of teaching ourselves responsible judgment when it comes to history (or for that matter life). Basically, the greater vs. the lesser truth is determined by the preponderance of the EVIDENCE--what is more-so/less-so the case.  So it's not a simple all or nothing matter of truth.  It's not as simple as one side being the truth-tellers and the other being liars (because liars have to know the truth first before deciding to lie about it no?). It's not as simple as dismissing something as "that's just a generalization."  The point is whether the generalization is more-so or less-so true based on the available facts.  Thus one or several exceptions cannot invalidate the greater truth that exists.  Here are some examples that will hopefully further clarify this concept: Example 1: Seat belts.  An example of this is about seat belts.  Seat belts both kill and save lives.  But which is the greater truth?  The greater truth is that the use of seat belts saves lives.  This has been proven with empirical EVIDENCE; most people accept this as being true even if they don't necessarily buckle up.  Nevertheless, is it not also true that sometimes the use of a seat belt might well prove fatal as when someone is trapped in a vehicle unable to free themselves?  Thus the lesser truth emerges here that seat belts kill.  Thus both assertions are true--seat belts both kill and save lives.  The question for the historian is to discern between the greater and lesser versions of the truth.   Example 2: Holocaust Denial.  Another example is that raised by deniers of the Holocaust.  So who should we believe?  Were Jews systematically exterminated in huge numbers or not?  Or as this image displays, is this all some gigantic hoax or lie?  Holocaust deniers point at that the six million figure is not accurate.  That is true in that we do not not have the exact number to the person.  But this lesser truth does not invalid the greater truth.  Once again we return to the general rule:  preponderance of the evidence.   Most historians and scholars reject Holocaust denial as "grounded in hatred, rather than any accepted standards of assertion, evidence, and truth" and a "pseudoscience" that "rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence," that instead is primarily motivated by an anti-semitic (anti-Jewish) ideology.  While a few Holocaust deniers have training as historians, some of their most prominent representatives have been shown in court to have a pattern of falsifying historical documents (e.g. David Irving) or deliberately misrepresenting historical data (e.g. Ernst Zündel).  This history of Holocaust deniers distorting, ignoring, or misusing historical records has led to almost universal condemnation of the techniques and conclusions of Holocaust denial, with organizations such as the American Historical Association, the largest society of historians in the United States, stating that Holocaust denial is "at best, a form of academic fraud."  Despite a gap in knowledge here and there, the greater truth remains that the Holocaust was a Nazi government policy deliberately targeting the Jews and the Gypsies for extermination as a people; over five million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies; and tools of efficient mass extermination, such as gas chambers, were used in extermination camps.  Example 3: Six Blind Men & the Elephant.  This example comes from John Godfrey Saxe's ( 1816-1887) version of the famous Indian legend.  The moral of the story is that while "each was partly in the right" have at least the lesser truth, "all were in the wrong" because each settled for the lesser truth without going further to explore more of the evidence to better ascertain the "greater truth" of what what is the metaphorical elephant. It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. The First approach'd the Elephant, And happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a wall!" The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, -"Ho! what have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!" The Third approached the animal, And happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a snake!" The Fourth reached out his eager hand, And felt about the knee. "What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," quoth he, "'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!"