A fairly recent study delivered rather sobering results when college students were tested on different literacy skills. Amazingly, over 50% of the students who were getting close to graduation lacked the necessary skills to complete certain tasks, such as being able to understand a newspaper editorial. More than 50% of the students at a four year university program and more than 75% at two year institutions were unable to perform more complex tasks that included comparing credit cards with different annual fees and interest rates. Perhaps one of the most disquieting results was the inability to summarize the results of a survey concerning parental involvement in schools.

The main areas of this particular study included analyzing stories in the news and other writings, comprehending documents and utilizing the math skills necessary for checkbooks and even restaurant tips. One of the researchers may have understated the feeling of most when he said that it was a “little disturbing” that at this level of higher education students could not perform basic tasks.

On the brighter side, a majority of the students at four year schools and community colleges did demonstrate some intermediate skills, meaning that they were able to perform some moderately challenging tasks. Some examples of the tasks that our college students were able to perform included finding the cost of office supplies ordered, consulting a reference guide in order to find out what vitamins are in different foods and identifying locations on a map.

There is a brighter side; the overall average literacy level of university students is actually higher than the average level of adult literacy nationwide. However, even though it sounds encouraging, experts claim it is not exactly surprising given the fact that the group of adults tested included those who had significantly less education.

College students, when compared with like levels of education in others, showed superior skills when searching and using information that has been gathered from texts and documents. Many of the students performed very poorly with problems that involved math and that 20% of those students who were going for a four year degree possessed the most basic of quantitative skills. For example, they were not able to estimate whether or not a car had adequate fuel to make it to a gas station and about 30% of them following a two year path had only the basic mathematical skills.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.