One of the few standardized tests that assesses the analytical reasoning skills of college students is the Collegiate Learning Assessment.  The Mastery Level of the CLA+ requires students to solve an analytical reasoning problem and write about it.  Some scholars believe that the performance tasks in this test are too general and too easy.  However, even if the score is slightly inflated, this news is still not good.

Two-thirds of college freshmen are not proficient in analytical reasoning.  Equally concerning is the fact that four years later, after the less proficient students have dropped out of the system, the more select group of seniors is only 61 percent proficient in analytical reasoning.  This evidence seems to back up the complaint of employers that the graduates that they hire do not possess quality problem solving skills.

The students who drop out of the system, as well as those who stay in it, are in need of more robust training in analytical reasoning.  Without it, they cannot become proficient from the passive position of listening to a professor.  Therefore, active learning methodologies are necessary for professors who want to train students in this valuable transferable skill.  The keys to active learning are:

1. Students are actively using application and analysis learning behaviors.
2. Students clearly understand the breakdown of the analytical process and can evaluate their choices alongside other possibilities.

Active Learning → Analytical Reasoning

How do you train college freshmen to use an analytical process, as well as reflect upon it and improve it?  Again, you need to break down the process into the following components:

1. Inquiry, background, and selected evidence
2. A scaffold of the key thinking process of applying and analyzing with a mind map or organization of the concepts that will answer the question
3. A professor-led discussion of the conclusions, as well as a review of the analytical processes that led to the conclusions.

The above breakdown can be used for more complex problems that use sources.  Less complex active learning activities might include the following:

1. Giving data or information to students and having them respond to some provocative question using a poll quiz in class or by writing brief response papers
2. Providing a document or evidence and a series of questions that require students to break down and understand the document better
3. Simply giving a five-point quiz or poll in the midst of a lecture that asks students to apply a concept to a given case

A look at Bloom’s Taxonomy shows once again that analytical reasoning uses all the learning behaviors that appear in the charts I’ve presented.

Professors do not have to turn their courses upside-down in order to make these changes.  In fact, I encourage professors who are transitioning from traditional, lecture-only teaching styles to go slow, steady, and small.  The more exposure that students have to these small active learning opportunities, the better.  You should learn how to manage students, develop your own discussion style, and experience what works best for you and your students before trying more ambitious activities.

Active Learning Lecture → Lecture + Active Learning Activities + Polls

I recommend blending a lecture-based approach with active learning strategies.   The lecture platform is essential to the classroom, but one of its major problems is that it works against the human attention span.  The research below demonstrates this phenomenon:

• Forty percent of the time, students are not attentive to what is being said in a lecture.
• After the first 20 minutes, student attention drops off dramatically.
• Students retain 70 percent of information in the first 10 minutes of lecture, while they only retain 20 percent of the information from the final 10 minutes of the session.

Below is a physical representation of how the attention span works in a traditional lecture setting versus an active learning lecture structure. In the traditional lecture, there are 20 minutes of high attention followed by 30 minutes of weak attention, and, finally, 10 minutes of low attention.

An active learning lecture setting on the right incorporates several activities and learning behaviors from understanding, to analyzing, to evaluating. These activities periodically revive the brain’s ability to attend and participate. The first 5 minutes involve a poll or quiz to introduce and pique interest in the lecture.  This segment is followed by 25 minutes of traditional lecture, which occurs within the timespan that students still maintain high attention levels. In the third segment, however, students switch gears.  They form groups among themselves and discuss the independent work they have completed on an active learning problem that is related to the lecture and they process to discuss their findings with one another for around 15-20 minutes.  In the final 10 minutes, the professor discusses the conclusions of the activity with the whole class. If there is an additional 15 minutes of class time, the professor may return to lecture, confident that the students are beginning a new attention cycle and will retain what is now being presented.

The definition of close reading is “the disciplined reading and rereading of inherently complex and worthy texts.”  Note that there are two underlying assumptions that characterize this definition:

1. The texts are supposed to be both challenging and necessary
2. The student must learn a read/study discipline in order to absorb them

Close Reading → Brief, Complex Texts

 In other words, these texts are not beach reading for students; on the contrary, they fall decidedly outside the average student’s comfort zone.  To really master the knowledge contained in the reading, one must exercise the disciplines of reading, re-reading, reflecting, asking oneself questions, prioritizing concepts, and considering the author’s intent and choices.

As such, the first rule of close reading is to keep the texts reasonably brief and concise, but also challenging.  It would be a mistake to throw hundreds of pages of complex academic content at the students based on the theory that it is “good” for them, or because you consider yourself a “rigorous” professor. This misguided approach leads to the following:

I have found that the brief, complex academic texts that I want students to close read are about 4,000-5,000 words of disciplined weekly reading, or about 12 pages per week.  Overall, however, I want students to read closer to 30 pages per week, as this is also recommended by reading specialists.  Because of this, I supplement the close reading with ease reading in the form of narrative books and papers at the general or popular reading level of grade levels 8-9.  The combination of the academic text and two supplementary books or a collection of articles per semester has worked well for me. I also know that this meets the recommendations of reading specialists who suggest 150,000-200,000 words of assigned reading in the college classroom. 

Close Reading → Brief, Complex Texts + Reading Chunking

Beyond the question of quantity, a disciplined reading strategy must also be established. The basic formula is this: the more your students struggle with academic reading, the more necessary it is to breakdown or “chunk” the reading material, and the more important it is to test your students with frequent quizzes.  I believe that a 2,000-word chunked reading (5-6 pages) is the minimum that should be assigned to a college student.  If you have a student who cannot sustain reading for 5-6 pages, even with support, they may be too far out of the range of college-level reading proficiency.

Close Reading → Brief Complex Texts + Reading Chunking + Scaffolding

 Next, it is important to add what education experts call scaffolds, or techniques and support systems that help students develop their reading discipline. There are two kinds of reading scaffolds:

1. Modality supports, or using the senses to facilitate reading (least-to-most-effective are audio, visual, and kinesthetic/note-taking)
2. Internal discovery of the reading, or directing the student to see the structure of the writing with questions, as well as signal words and phrases

Finally, you want to be sure that the frequent quizzes you are assigning contain questions that are detailed, conceptual, and inferential and which can be linked directly to the study questions and signal words and phrases.  You may allow the quiz questions to be on the easier side in the beginning–however, you should make sure that you are not assessing answers on a study guide, but drawing from the actual assigned reading.  This ensures that the students’ reading comprehension levels can be evaluated and improved.

The reading level of students entering college is rather elusive, but it is usually calculated in one of two ways. One is based upon the national average of placement scores, which indicates that about 50 percent of entering freshmen read at a grade 12 level. Alternatively, “The Nation’s Report Card” of the NAEP indicates that about 38 percent of graduating high school seniors read proficiently at a grade 12 level, which would suggest a proficiency level percentage in the mid 50s for the group that will enter college. In addition to these estimates, a highly publicized study by the Renaissance Learning Organization determined that the reading material of college English classes is on roughly grade 7 level, which led the RLO to conclude that, in reality, college students really don’t read beyond the middle school level.

Let’s move beyond the battle of statistics for a moment and look a little more deeply at how the transferable skill of college reading relates to the larger picture of college graduation and employability. The chart below tracks the reading levels of books on the New York Times Bestsellers List, as well as those of other types of literature.

There are a few key pieces of information to note when observing this data. First, the bestselling books fit into a grade 8 reading level (highlighted by the oval). Next, note that fiction literature generally falls within a lower reading level than does nonfiction literature. Finally, notice that academic papers, textbooks, political literature, and government reports–indicated by the bars on the right–are distinctive in that they fall under the much higher difficulty level of grades 11-12.

How do we explain this data? First, the median reading level of American adults is around grade 8, as detailed in the chart below. If bestselling authors, such as Malcolm Gladwell, intend to sell books, they need to write for the median audience. Although many people reading Malcolm Gladwell are probably capable of reading at a higher level, a grade level 8 is a comfortable one, for which one doesn’t have to strain, slow down, re-read, and reflect too often.

This observation is very important for college professors because it reveals that there are two types of reading–“ease” reading and “work” reading. What is the difference between grade 8 “ease” reading and the grade 12 “work” reading that is required for academic texts? The three discomforting features of academic texts are:

1. Very conceptually-driven or analytically narrative passages (as opposed to simple narrative)
2. Difficult, very precise vocabulary
3. Complex sentences with lots of dependent clauses contributing a lot of content

While tempting, it would be unwise for professors to eliminate these uncomfortable characteristics, or to “dumb down” their readings. In fact, I want to suggest that academic reading should be thought of as the training ground for “work” reading–that is, the complex memos, reports, data, and topical readings of modern, professional employment. The real takeaway here is that successful, well-educated people prefer to read at grade 8 level, but they work at the level of grade 12 or higher.

So, what is the strategy for training students to develop a “work” reading mode? Reading specialists tell us that “close reading” is the best way to teach those who read comfortably at grade 8 to cope with and learn how to read less comfortable but necessary grade 11-12 academic texts. The chart below lists the three basics of this strategy.

In the next blog, I will describe the mechanics of close reading in the lower division classroom.

1. Tradition
2. The assumption that college-bound students already have the skills necessary to utilize this sophisticated knowledge.

I emphasize social mobility because it is an important underlying theme in today’s political climate on both sides of the aisle. It is obvious that Americans treasure this “Dream” and have become very disappointed that it does not seem to be coming true for them.  They are frustrated by what they perceive as their leaders’ lack of sufficient attention to this massive problem, and they want a fix sooner rather than later.

As you might expect, the root cause of this decreasing relative social mobility is complex, and there are no easy ways to repair massive socioeconomic shifts like this one.  Globalization and, even more importantly, automation have resulted in the loss of many US jobs–especially lower-skilled fields such as manufacturing.  These trends, regardless of political efforts, will continue to accelerate.  To revive the American Dream, middle and working class Americans need leaders and institutions that help them work with and around these long-term economic trends.

From 2007-2009, this happened: 

. . . and since 2010, this development followed: 

Writing is the most difficult, and yet the most valuable transferable skill.  Unfortunately, few students arrive at college with the ability to write proficiently, and not many become proficient writers while attending college.

Various studies indicate that the percentage of entry-level freshmen who write proficiently at the college level ranges from the high 20s to the low 30s.  A recently published and notably provocative book about the lack of learning that takes place in college, Academically Adrift, bemoans the fact that college students are not asked to write enough.  Students who were surveyed reported that they were only asked to write a total of 20+ pages in about 50 percent of their college classes.

Based on my own experience, I suspect that these numbers are inflated.  First, proficiency tests are based on writing prompts and samples that are at a much simpler level than those required by the social science minimal writing standard (which is about 8 pages worth of thesis-driven argument that integrates a variety of evidence sources and material).  Moreover, a minority of students in my own surveys of undergraduates at a four-year university indicated that they had written more than 5 pages in lower-division college courses, let alone 20.

I believe that about 15-20 percent of college freshmen are proficient in social science writing.  As a result, my goal was to train another 40 percent of students in a lower-division history course how to successfully craft and compose a standard social science paper.  In my experience, prioritizing history writing in lower-division courses was both gratifying and beneficial.  Student evaluations read: “This is the first time in my life that a teacher has really showed me how to write.”  It turns out that students do not balk in the face of a challenging writing assignment if they have a clear, detailed road map that lays out exactly what is expected of them.

A solid writing training program depends on the integration of all the learning behaviors in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The three keys components of this training are:

1. Break down the steps of the writing process to meet the specific needs of a social science paper.
2. Design an explicit and clear set of instructional scaffolds that build students’ critical thinking about each step of the writing process.
3. Set up writing groups and submission procedures for a series of informal and formal assessments.

The chart below demonstrates the writing project plan for a GE standard 1500-word history paper.

The real secret sauce in this writing process is the detailed, scaffolded activities in the middle column.  Why?  Because the professor must be an activator, not a facilitator, of the critical thinking that is involved in the writing process. Some activities and learning behaviors can be completed independently and online, but they should be brought to a professor-led classroom discussion for review and analysis.

The image below provides a visualization of the breakdown of the thesis-writing step in the essay-writing process.  The professor can begin by instructing students as to the qualities of a strong thesis, as well as the markers of a weak thesis.  Students then complete an online quiz in which they are asked to select the superior thesis in a choice between two theses.  The professor then follows-up by including a discussion and analysis of these quiz items in the next week’s class.  A couple of days later, students submit their individual theses to the professor for checking, revising, and approval.

In my estimation, social science professors who want to participate in the generalized improvement of students’ writing level in the lower-division courses will need to contribute 10-15 minutes of classroom time to this project each week.  Although this does involve grading the crafted parts of students’ papers twice before grading the end product, it does not take much more time than grading a very bad final paper in which students have been left to their own devices.  Detailed, scaffolded activities also require a little bit of time to learn how to activate, but within a couple of semesters, composing them becomes quite simple and will feel like second-nature.

Yes, a professor does have to give up a little bit of time and self-training to teach writing and composition skills effectively.  However, in gauging whether or not it is worth your extra time, you only have to remember two numbers: 86% and 88%.  These are, respectively, the percentages of college professors and employers who believe that writing effectively is a very important transferable skill-one that is critical to students’ future prospects in the job market.