Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book (Univ. Of Chicago Press)by Richard Arum, derives from an unusual study that followed several thousand undergraduates in the USA through 4 years of study. The important finding is that 45% of students made no significant improvement in their  critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two  years of college. After four years, 36%  showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking  skills.
Being able to be critical about what you find and read and then build up an agument is what I am teaching most of the time. Therefore this report is of interesting to me and is a light bulb moment  for those of us involved in Information Literacy. For more see here and here.
 
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