Yes, they also publish one of the best college guides in the country ( well reviewed by many publications ).
Posted on 09/18/2007 9:16:24 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
America’s Founders were convinced American freedom could survive only if each generation understood its founding principles and the sacrifices made to maintain it.
Failing Our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America’s History and Institutions asks: Is American higher education doing its duty to prepare the next generation to maintain our legacy of liberty?
In fall 2005, researchers at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy (UConnDPP), commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s (ISI) National Civic Literacy Board, conducted a survey of some 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. Students were asked 60 multiple-choice questions to measure their knowledge in four subject areas: America’s history, government, international relations, and market economy. The disappointing results were published by ISI in fall 2006 in The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. Seniors, on average, failed all four subjects, and their overall average score was 53.2%.
This report follows up on The Coming Crisis in Citizenship. It is based on an analysis of the results of a second survey of some 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges conducted by the research team at UConn in the fall of 2006. The results of this second survey corroborate and extend the results of the first. Seniors once again failed all four subjects.
The question now is: Will legislators, donors, trustees, parents, and other decision-makers hold colleges accountable?
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MAJOR FINDINGS Finding 1: College Seniors Failed a Basic Test on America’s History and Institutions. The average college senior knows astoundingly little about America’s history, government, international relations and market economy, earning an “F” on the American civic literacy exam with a score of 54.2%. Harvard seniors did best, but their overall average was 69.6%, a disappointing D+.
Finding 2: Colleges Stall Student Learning about America. From kindergarten through 12th grade, the average student gains 2.3 points per year in civic knowledge, almost twice the annual gain of the average college student. Students at some colleges did learn more per year than students in grade school, demonstrating that it is possible.
Eastern Connecticut State, one of 25 colleges randomly selected for this year’s survey, was the best performer, increasing civic knowledge by 9.65 points. Rhodes College, which increased civic knowledge by 7.42 points, was the best performer among 18 elite colleges surveyed both this year and last. Rhodes was also the best overall performer last year. Finding 3: America’s Most Prestigious Universities Performed the Worst. Colleges that do well in popular rankings typically do not do well in advancing civic knowledge.
Generally, the higher U.S. News & World Report ranks a college, the lower it ranks here in civic learning. At four colleges U.S. News ranked in its top 12 (Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton), seniors scored lower than freshmen. These colleges are elite centers of “negative learning.” Cornell was the third-worst performer last year and the worst this year. Surveyed colleges ranked by Barron’s imparted only about one-third the civic learning of colleges overlooked by Barron’s. Finding 4: Inadequate College Curriculum Contributes to Failure. The number of history, political science, and economics courses a student takes helps determine, together with the quality of these courses, whether he acquires knowledge about America during college. Students generally gain one point of civic knowledge for each civics course taken. The average senior, however, has taken only four such courses.
Finding 5: Greater Learning about America Goes Hand-in-Hand with More Active Citizenship. Students who gain more civic knowledge during college are more likely to vote and engage in other civic activities than students who gain less.
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ADDITIONAL FINDINGS Additional Finding 1: Higher Quality Family Life Contributes to More Learning about America. College seniors whose families engaged in frequent conversations about current events and history, whose parents were married and living together, and who came from homes where English was the primary language all tended to learn more than students who lacked these advantages.
Additional Finding 2: American Colleges Under-Serve Minority Students. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. eloquently argued that the civil rights movement was rooted in America’s founding documents as well as key historical events and decisions. American colleges today are not helping minorities learn this heritage. On average, minority seniors (Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Multiracial) answered less than half the exam questions correctly and made no significant overall gain in civic knowledge during college. Civic-knowledge gain among whites was six times greater.
Additional Finding 3: American Colleges Don’t Teach Their Foreign Students about America. The average foreign student at an American college learns nothing about America’s history and institutions. Colleges thus squander an opportunity to foster greater understanding of America’s institutions in an increasingly hostile world.
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QUESTIONS OF ACCOUNTABILITY 1: Are Parents and Students Getting Their Money’s Worth from College Costs? The least-expensive colleges increase civic knowledge more than the most expensive.
2: Are Taxpayers and Legislators Getting Their Money’s Worth from College Subsidies? Colleges enjoying larger subsidies in the form of government-funded grants to students tend to increase civic knowledge less than colleges enjoying smaller such subsidies.
3: Are Alumni and Philanthropists Getting Their Money’s Worth from the Donations they make to Colleges? Some of the worst-performing colleges also have the largest, most rapidly growing endowments. These include Yale, Penn, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell.
4: Are College Trustees Getting Their Money’s Worth from College Presidents? Six of the 10 worst-performing colleges also ranked among the top 10 for the salaries they paid their presidents. These include Penn, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers and Duke, which paid their presidents $500,000 or more.
5: Are Colleges Encouraging Students to Take Enough Courses about America’s History and Institutions and Then Assessing the Quality of These Courses? The average senior had completed only four courses in history, political science, and economics. But more courses taken did not always mean more knowledge gained. At eight colleges, each additional civics course a student completed, on average, decreased his civic knowledge
I got 95% and could kick myself for missing the three questions I did. I think overall the quiz was excellent and something like this should be required for citizenship.
Excellent thoughts. I agree that high school is the place to learn civics and history. My daughter went to a Christian high school and had a much better high-school education that I ever had. I had decent history classes which she also had, but she had much superior English Lit classes. I think that high schools should teach History and Civics a LOT more carefully.
The Left has no intension of teaching real American History and Civics, for to do so would be counterproductive to their revolutionary purpose--to subvert our culture of freedom and replace it with a communist state.
This revolution has been a long time coming--middle 19th century. When the people are disamred, they can complete (or try to) their plans.
The letter grading system is meaningless to evaluate this test. It all depends on how difficult the test was written. If the test was written to be very easy would you say that it is amazing that every college earned an A?
I have had many physics and engineering tests where *nobody* scored higher than 60% and where the class mean was 40%. This doesn't mean that the class didn't understand the physics. It was just that the test was written extremely hard. These kind of tests weed out the people who don't know anything in the subject. If you don't study hard for one of those tests you will score 10%, and since it was graded on a curve you will get hammered ruthlessly.
I have also had to write tests when I was operating nuclear reactors in the Navy so that we had some expected average score and some expected failure rate. If too few people (fully qualified nuclear operators) were failing then the tests were too easy and they needed to be rewritten If too many were failing then the tests were too hard. And if the command didn't pay attention to this fact then outside of ship monitoring would.
83.33% here
I bet the average FReeper would score higher than the average of any of the universities tested.
The civics and American history part is fine. But about 20 of the 60 questions were devoted to philosophy, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. You may think that these should be part of civics, but I don't think that is necessarily reasonable. I would certainly argue that philosophy and economics have had significant effects on how our government is shaped, but I would not think a citizen is lacking in his or her civic duties by knowing only American history and the design of our government. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't expect 75% of Americans have a clue who St Thomas Aquinas is or what Keynesian economics is. I would expect them to be able to describe the more significant cases the Supreme Court has heard, how the Constitution is structured, what the Declaration of Independence says, what the major political alliances that the US has participated in were, and how the different wars that we have participated in were started and concluded.
I am not one to argue that civics and history are being successfully taught in our schools. In one memorable exchange with a nuclear mechanic on my old submarine I asked him the rough dates of when the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War II were fought. He got one right (I'll let you guess which one). Many of the dates he gave were off by more than a century. Sad. But he was still a good mechanic. These things were never taught to him in school and he never cared for them either way. But he could tell you how many turns per inch of lockwire you would need for some arbitrary sized nut or how to mechanically start up a turbine generator. If you think this is bad, most sailors I met couldn't tell me what happened at the Battle of Midway nor who Lord Nelson was! I should note that most of them had a decent knowledge in civics and history. There were some that were extremely knowledgeable in civics that could cite every battle in every war we fought, almost repeat lines of the Constitution verbatim, and describe the intricacies of many of the treaties we have signed (like SALT II). It is from talks with those sailors that I now know what I do about American history and the Constitution. But even they would have looked at me odd if I started asking who St. Thomas Aquinas or Alexis de Tocqueville was (except perhaps the officers who had courses in philosophy).
Considering your online moniker, you need to learn to link more...
Oh, I only missed the correct answer to #21. 59 others were correct.
#27 doesn’t belong on a “civic literacy” test.
The surprising thing is this -— some school administrators are painting the result as POSITIVE. Even if you are ranked first or second in the test results, a D+ average for your students should not be cause for satisfaction.
See here (from the Pennsylvania area) :
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_528201.html
Grove City students shine in history knowledge
By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
American college students as a group are as likely to flunk a basic history exam as pass it, but a study released Tuesday found those at Grove City College know more than most.
The study for the Washington, D.C.-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows the nation’s freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities scored an average of just more than 50 percent — or an F — on a basic American history test.
Among Pennsylvania schools, Grove City seniors ranked second nationally with 67.3 percent correct; the University of Pennsylvania, eighth, with 63.5 percent; and Carnegie Mellon University, 20th, with 56.9 percent.
“Schools are not focusing much on civic literacy,” concluded Ken Dautrich, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut, who conducted the study. “They’re focusing more on math, science, specialization and business degrees.”
“Grove City is attracting students into their program that are already better informed on the civic education scale,” he said.
William P. Anderson, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Grove City, said he was pleased by the results.
“It shows our general education curriculum and the way we teach students history and political philosophy prepares them for citizenship,” he said.
Students answered 60 questions on American politics, U.S. history, American economy and foreign relations.
Joe Trotter, head of the history department at Carnegie Mellon, attributed its low score to adding the history of women, blacks and other ethnic and racial groups to the curriculum.
“The result of that is some of the things that we considered conventional knowledge has had to share a place with the knowledge that very few people knew anything about 30 years ago,” he said.
The study showed that students attending Ivy League and other high-priced schools had some of the lowest scores. In addition, students across the nation showed little gain in their knowledge of history between their freshmen and senior years — an average of 3.8 points.
Grove City seniors improved by 3.6 points, Carnegie Mellon by 2.8 points and Penn by 0.8 points.
Trotter said Carnegie Mellon is training undergraduates to become historians themselves. He said its students would have scored better if they had been tested on an expanded view of history.
Students at Grove City must take six courses or 18 credits on the history of civilization. Dautrich said freshmen there scored so high that they “had less room to move up.”
I got the chance to go to the Democratic Underground ( the left wing version of Free Republic ). Apparently a lot of them took the test as well. Not scoring very well compared to Freepers. See here for a glimpse :
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2995426
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