Saturday, January 28, 2006

Do you sometimes fell like you're banging your head on a brick wall?


American Institutes for Research has a new study that shows even our college students are dumb.
Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of students earning 2-year degrees – have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, according to a new national survey by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
In reading the report I was struck that only 13% of all American adults are proficient enough in literacy to compare viewpoints in two editorials.

Nothing Matters and What If It Did had the popular press version of this story from the AP on ABC News and it made her sick.
More than half of students at four-year colleges and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills no matter their field of study.

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.


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