Changes in high school education and impact on colleges.

[CharonY]

Over the last 10-20 years I noticed a gradual change in the learning abilities of college students, but have largely put it down to generational differences, such as changes in learning preferences, work ethics and so on. Basically things that old folks have always complained about the younger generations. However, over in the last couple of years and especially due to disruptions by COVID-19 these gradual changes have accelerated and it seems increasingly to me that student performance is not dropping because they have different priorities in life, but rather that increasingly they just do not how. There are minor things including the inability to use a computer (as they are used to cell phones and apps), but also major things like reading (and comprehending) papers. Now, in the past it was fairly common that many students would just muddle their way through but it seems that nowadays students are struggling, even if they invest a ton of time, which seemed to me like a qualitative change in the situation.

I came across this article in The Atlantic that described the exact situation that I see, except it is for  the arts.

Quote

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

Now, there are worldwide drops in student performance even before the pandemic (but certainly accelerated by it), and in many countries the scores peaked around 2010. The overall decline in scores do not seem particularly dramatic, but anecdotally many of my colleagues who have been teaching for more than 10 years are noticing that not only performance is dropping, but that also strategies used to help struggling students do not work anymore.

I suspect that we are looking at more fundamental change in how the younger generation processes information, e.g. with an emphasis of quantity vs depth and that it will eventually have profound impact on how learning will change. Again, I acknowledge that every generation has complained about the next one, but it does seem to me that currently, the younger folks are struggling more while achieving less. It would be different if they chose to work less, but the combination of struggling, being stressed out and still underachieving seems to me a rather bad combination.

It is not a necessarily a doom and gloom scenario, as they will have to figure it out somehow, but right now it seems that the main strategy, especially among the younger generation of educators, is to make the material more shallow and expect less of the student. I am not sure whether in the long run this is the right strategy, though. 

I am aware that most folks on this site are on the older end of the spectrum, but I would be curious if folks have experiences (e.g. from kids or grandkids) to share on this matter. I am aware that my experiences have been narrowly focussed on College education (in a limited number of countries).

[StringJunky]

If you think in terms of computer software hierarchies and using them, from low level programming to high level programming, each generation rises a level as the software becomes more automated in executing tasks. Although they've risen practically, in terms of what can be accomplished with the higher level software, they lose the learning of the processes that underpin the modern methods.

The more fundamental, increasingly historical stuff is ultimately and progressively, through time, is left to specialized experts and hobby nerds. If the mental processes you laboured and learned at school have been presently automated for your current students, they don't need to learn the 'hard way', like you did.

What it means in evolutionary terms is that the skillset of students in each era is constantly changing, and it is that which needs to be acknowledged. Each generation gets comfortable with the technology and methodologies of their day and begins to struggle after say the 50-60 age mark.

Edited Tuesday at 08:14 PM by StringJunky

[CharonY]

This is a good point, however, I think there at some issues with it. First, if there are easy ways to learn things, we should be able to see some improvement (or at least no change) in areas of higher level of understanding. This, unfortunately is not the case. If we use e.g. Blooms taxonomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy), college students currently fail at the the level of understand and only few reach it the apply stage (i.e. at a much lower rate than it used to be). I.e. they are increasingly overwhelmed by simple as well as complex tasks.

This is especially noticeable at the graduate level where students were able to work semi-independently, but which is a challenge for many research groups nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I assumed that exactly what you mentioned should be happening. Especially easy access to information (including the rise of wikipedia) should have created changes in how students learn and limit the "wasted" time in libraries to search for sources, for example. But again, I don't think this happened.

 

One of the reasons for that is related to what was outlined in the article. I.e., by removing the need to learn things the hard way, they also lost the ability to learn effectively. I have come to the (preliminary and probably trivial) conclusion that practicing some low level skills are necessary as a foundation to develop more complex skills. Similar to practicing scales in order to play more complex pieces. I think in education we thought that there are shortcuts (e.g. videos) but while they have been good in getting student's scores up by catering to their inclinations, it also has eroded their ability to e.g. simply focus on lengthier texts. Perhaps at some point someone will develop a method of learning that does not involve reading, but I wouldn't even know how it would work (short of directly re-wiring brains).

A third element which is more tangential is that I also think that students are not sufficiently bored. This may sound odd but they are constantly flooded by information (and most not of the good sort). This seems to impact their ability to creatively approach a problem. Either they see an immediate solution, or they give up and do not want to think about it anymore. Again, there may be ways to address that, but I have not yet seena  good approach. 

Again, I am not saying that we need to introduce old ways. However, at least on the college level (and the article shows that it starts earlier), we see that getting rid of the hard stuff actually also reduces the ability of students to perform mildly complicated tasks. I was hoping that this would only be transient, until we figured out how to deal with distractions, such as cell phones and social media. However, the trend seems to be expanding and is worldwide an increasing issue, at least based on anecdotal experiences. I have taken to ask colleagues from around the world (including junior scientists) about the performance of their students. And especially after a few beers there are similar observations. It is not that every single student is underperforming, but even in elite universities (where there is stronger entry selection) the ratio of high vs low performing students has shifted to the latter. 

More than a few colleagues have abandoned more complex research areas in favour of simplified projects as a consequence, which is somewhat worrying to me (as I do the same).

 

 

[StringJunky]

Quote

One of the reasons for that is related to what was outlined in the article. I.e., by removing the need to learn things the hard way, they also lost the ability to learn effectively. I have come to the (preliminary and probably trivial) conclusion that practicing some low level skills are necessary as a foundation to develop more complex skills. 

Yes I think the more difficult the route to learning, the more robustly it is implanted in the memory.

Experiencing failure more often in the pursuit of understanding ideas, trying different things out, sets the student up better for the real world where no one's holding their hand. They are getting a taste of the real world earlier, instead of in bite-sized pieces with all the irrelevant stuff neatly removed. In a nutshell, I suppose, the trend is towards an emphasis on finding answers as the ultimate goal, rather than path leading to the answer. 

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

Yes I think the more difficult the route to learning, the more robustly it is implanted in the memory.

Experiencing failure more often in the pursuit of understanding ideas, trying different things out, sets the student up better for the real world where no one's holding their hand. They are getting a taste of the real world earlier, instead of in bite-sized pieces with all the irrelevant stuff neatly removed. In a nutshell, I suppose, the trend is towards an emphasis on finding answers as the ultimate goal, rather than path leading to the answer. 

That is what the current system (including middle and highschool) is failing to achieve. I.e. the students struggle with finding a path that allows them to tackle questions. I think in part is because they are used to find quick answers on the internet, they never built the skill to synthesize information and apply it to a question at hand. The issue, I think is that without having at least a foundation of sorts, they won't be able to develop the skills needed to get to that point.

[studiot]

10 hours ago, CharonY said:

I think in part is because they are used to find quick answers on the internet, they never built the skill to synthesize information and apply it to a question at hand. The issue, I think is that without having at least a foundation of sorts, they won't be able to develop the skills needed to get to that point.

Yes I agree,.

 

12 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Yes I think the more difficult the route to learning, the more robustly it is implanted in the memory.

Experiencing failure more often in the pursuit of understanding ideas, trying different things out, sets the student up better for the real world where no one's holding their hand. They are getting a taste of the real world earlier, instead of in bite-sized pieces with all the irrelevant stuff neatly removed. In a nutshell, I suppose, the trend is towards an emphasis on finding answers as the ultimate goal, rather than path leading to the answer. 

 

I think this has been going on for longer than maybe people realise, at least in the West.

I understand the Asian Tiger economies favour a more traditonal curriculum.

 

I remember at the end of the 1990s having a disagrement with my daughter's maths teacher pre GCSE.

 

I took an interst in the stuff they were teachi ng and asked, "well when are you going on to the final stage, GCSEs are very close now"

 

I was referring to my recollection of 1950s/1960s school where GCE were taught.

My point was that exam questions were oten in two parts.

The first part demonstrated knowledge of some theorem or technique.

The second part (whcih carried the most marks) demonstrated the use of that theorem.

But not directly, as now.  That was covered in practise before the exams.

The student woudl be asked to demonstrate or calculate some result that was not directly obtainable from the material supplied.
She had to understand and realise the intermediate result that was needed from the supplied material,  to then obtain the final required one.

 

This I think is what CharonY means.

I I hold it is vitally important.

 

 

 

[CharonY]

I think you are not wrong that there has been a longer trend, but based on my experience the change from the 90s (I haven't yet taught then) to maybe around 2005-ish or maybe up to 2010 was rather slow. You would see a difference in skill between the oldest and the youngest cohort, but it was easy to catch them up during a practical course (or just in-lab training). I up to perhaps 2010 I could give students a set of protocols, talk them through it, answer questions and most would be able to figure out what to do and why. There were always a few that were not able to follow, because they did not get the why.

Somewhere around 2010 the proportion of students lacking the basics to understand what they were doing increased noticeably but one weird thing I noticed is that they stopped asking questions. I first believed that folks were more shy and I tried to engage them more proactively to figure out what they didn't understand. This worked to some degree, but increasingly, I realized that many didn't ask because they had no idea what to ask. I.e. quite a few lacked the basic ability of doing inquiries to figure out what is going on. Overt time it morphed into a strange passive system, where many students expect that the lecturer is going to figure out things for them.

So, what I think I see is that there is an acceleration in change and I think past changes were slow enough that remedies could be made (e.g. practical courses), but I think the pace has changed in a unprecedented way. What took a generational change now happens in less than a decade. I suspect the widespread use of AI is only going to accelerate things and I fear that our educational system is not able to deal with it.

[MigL]

I have a nephew whom I love dearly. He has his own business and is successful, but whenever he needs to do anything, he looks up a how-to on his phone and YouTube.
Most of his generation ( he's out of school for several years ) are used to the quick answers the internet provides, and sometimes have no clue how to obtain those answers without their phone/internet.
You see this all the time where a young person is trying to make change from a cash register.
I know if I was an astronaut on Apollo 13 and had to radio Houston that 'we had a problem', I could pull out a slide rule to calculate course corrections ( just like Tom Hanks ).
Not many people under 60 know what a slide rule is, or how logarithms allow it to work.

Todays world, and students in particular, are so dependent on technology that one EMP would end their world.

Edited Wednesday at 07:54 PM by MigL

[StringJunky]

20 minutes ago, MigL said:

I have a nephew whom I love dearly. He has his own business and is successful, but whenever he needs to do anything, he looks up a how-to on his phone and YouTube.
Most of his generation ( he's out of school for several years ) are used to the quick answers the internet provides, and sometimes have no clue how to obtain those answers without their phone/internet.
You see this all the time where a young person is trying to make change from a cash register.
I know if I was an astronaut on Apollo 13 and had to radio Houston that 'we had a problem', I could pull out a slide rule to calculate course corrections ( just like Tom Hanks ).
Not many people under 60 know what a slide rule is, or how logarithms allow it to work.

Todays world, and students in particular, are so dependent on technology that one EMP would end their world.

Todays students seem to have lost, or not been taught, the concept of working from first principles. TBH in my O-level years in 1977 working from first principles was dying even then when 'easier' exam boards came out, like Joint Matriculation Board exams, I found going from Cambridge exam papers to JMB papers the level of difficulty dropped significantly. There was more emphasis on multiple choice, for instance. The rot started in the UK, I think, with the end of the 11+ system, which I just missed. The trend was towards lowering the level of entry to university to be more inclusive/accessible to a larger cohort of high school students.

Edited Wednesday at 08:16 PM by StringJunky

[MigL]

I don't think you're saying that 'inclusivity' has been detrimental.
But definitely students shouldn't be 'protected' from 'hardships', or difficult concepts, they may encounter in the 'real world'.

I realize some can handle such hardships better than others, and once upon a time in Canada, we had High School to Gr12 for technical/trades education and a further Gr13  for University admission.
Nowdays, it seems such 'sorting' is not allowed, and university admission standards are set to allow the maximum numbers, even if some of those numbers are not capable ( may not be politically correct, but it is true ).

At least it is better than the US, where for some learning institutions, the only standard is how much money your parents have.

[StringJunky]

5 minutes ago, MigL said:

I don't think you're saying that 'inclusivity' has been detrimental.

What I was getting at is that equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of ability. Inequality of ability will always be there. The selection process for the genuinely able has been hobbled to include more people at the lower ability range.

[CharonY]

22 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

What I was getting at is that equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of ability. Inequality of ability will always be there. The selection process for the genuinely able has been hobbled to include more people at the lower ability range.

I think you both are not fundamentally wrong, but I think the current trend is something else. The US and also unfortunately Canada university administrators have an incentive to get more students in (for the sweet tuition money, so they can hire their next VP of student experience). This is has been an ongoing process, and has been accelerated each time the government contributes less. This includes getting more students in that are not suited, but it was not such a huge issue. The bad students ultimately fail, and there is little detriment to the performing students. Administration has tried to lower standards and it is unfortunately up to faculty to figure out how much they can fight that.

But even in the worst case, good students always performed at high levels. Now, even the good students are not great at performing. As outlined in the article in OP, even in elite universities, which still have strict selection, more and more students fail to come in with basic skills.

I.e. it is not just a lowering of standards, but that even those who otherwise would have performed well in the past, cannot perform well with the middle/ high school training they receive.

[Mordred]

The unfortunate part is that the factors are not just a case of funding and curriculum. For example when we went to school we were taught some useful skills that simply are not taught today.

One example being finding the square root of a large number say for example 6 digits long without resorting to a calculator using a sequence of division by two.

 I've also noticed that many recent high school graduates don't even know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions. Those same ppl quickly understood how once I spent a measly 15 to 20 minutes showing them.

So had nothing to do with their learning ability. They weren't shown before.

They relied on the calculator 

Edited Thursday at 01:26 AM by Mordred

[John Cuthber]

8 hours ago, Mordred said:

useful skills

 

8 hours ago, Mordred said:

finding the square root of a large number say for example 6 digits long without resorting to a calculator

How often is this useful in a world where you have "always" a phone with you?

[CharonY]

7 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

 

How often is this useful in a world where you have "always" a phone with you?

I think that is one aspect of the issue we are seeing. Low level answers are at everyone's fingertip. For a long time folks (including myself) thought that that would result in cutting down on wasted time and enable folks to perform on a higher level without the need to do all the legwork. However, increasingly it seems to me that doing the legwork teaches some less tangible skills that are actually required to develop the higher ones. Being able to read through longer text (vs someone giving you a summary) is an example. While getting summaries can help you regurgitate the gist of a text, it does not work if your goal is to apply your knowledge and use it to synthesize information from multiple sources (AI might be doing that but there are some issues, which are probably better discussed in their own threads). 

I think that developing reasoning (and lab) skills relies more on practice and repetition of low-level tasks than I thought and effectively eliminating those, might hobble the ability to develop high-level skills. There might be paths to reconcile this, but my worry is that most articles on higher education do not really focus on these aspects, but rather on elements such as engagement, which does seem mostly like a call to compete for attention with the devices. I.e. not a way forward but trying to slow down issues, if that makes sense.

[Genady]

My 5 cents. This recent article seems to be on the topic: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books - The Atlantic

Edited Friday at 01:47 AM by Genady

[CharonY]

That is very much on topic. So much that it is  in the OP

[studiot]

On 10/2/2024 at 5:31 PM, CharonY said:

I think you are not wrong that there has been a longer trend, but based on my experience the change from the 90s (I haven't yet taught then) to maybe around 2005-ish or maybe up to 2010 was rather slow. You would see a difference in skill between the oldest and the youngest cohort, but it was easy to catch them up during a practical course (or just in-lab training). I up to perhaps 2010 I could give students a set of protocols, talk them through it, answer questions and most would be able to figure out what to do and why. There were always a few that were not able to follow, because they did not get the why.

Yes I agree the change is accelerating.

 

But I see this as in some way linked to wider social changes.

The pressure on 'instant solutions' has increased apace with the changes to working patterns and female emancipation. Fewer and fewer women today remain at home cokking the dinner (amongst other things).

The commercial world has responded with greater 'sell' of ready made 'meals' and fast food more generally.

So we see a declining % of the population cooking from scratch or even able to do so.

Since this first started the 'role model' effect on the next generation has now had time to begin to take effect.

 

Further pressure is coming within schools as they outsource school meals, saving money on kitchen space.

This is also happening in practical subjects where workshops, sports facilities and laboratories are being reduced.

[Genady]

7 hours ago, CharonY said:

That is very much on topic. So much that it is  in the OP

[StringJunky]

18 hours ago, CharonY said:

I think that developing reasoning (and lab) skills relies more on practice and repetition of low-level tasks than I thought and effectively eliminating those, might hobble the ability to develop high-level skills. There might be paths to reconcile this, but my worry is that most articles on higher education do not really focus on these aspects, but rather on elements such as engagement, which does seem mostly like a call to compete for attention with the devices. I.e. not a way forward but trying to slow down issues, if that makes sense.

I agree, the practice of repetition, in terms of physical tasks, promotes muscle memory, rather like a musician practices scales. They start off thinking about it, then eventually embed the knowledge neuroplastically until it becomes intuitive. They don't need to see the keys/strings/buttons because they've mapped it mentally through repetition. If you don't get something into the intuitive level, you can't move on in terms of creativity etc. This process applies to education generally as well, I think.

I think diversity of input sources, rather than just consulting Google, as an example, promotes neuroplasticity. When we were at school, pre-Windows, finding sources, getting information from our sources was relatively labour intensive, but it promoted neuroplastic development because more senses were directed at a task. When we oldies (50+) hit on a problem, we can draw on a wider range of skills within ourselves and through media compared to the younger generations.

Getting your information on tap just through computers is boring for our brains and I don't think it's good for students in terms of promoting neuroplasticity in the long run because there isn't enough variation in effort to maintain stimulation.. If something's boring you just want to go the least laborious route to get it out of the way. The effect of that is much less information 'sticks' at the intuitive level, with the resulting reduction in creative potential.

Edited Friday at 11:48 AM by StringJunky

[CharonY]

6 hours ago, studiot said:

But I see this as in some way linked to wider social changes.

The pressure on 'instant solutions' has increased apace with the changes to working patterns and female emancipation. Fewer and fewer women today remain at home cokking the dinner (amongst other things).

The commercial world has responded with greater 'sell' of ready made 'meals' and fast food more generally.

So we see a declining % of the population cooking from scratch or even able to do so.

Since this first started the 'role model' effect on the next generation has now had time to begin to take effect.

I don't think there is so much a social change, but rather driven by practical change. The ubiquitous presence of cellphones/internet makes it easier just to type in the question verbatim and regurgitate the answer rather than thinking about the problem.  But perhaps even worse, it is also a source of constant distraction and entertainment which reduces the mental capacity of kids to even want to tackle a challenge. The one social change that I might be seeing is that kids are less able to deal with challenges in general and do not like to uncomfortable. For example, they dislike being put in a position where they do not know the outcome and/or might fail a task (e.g. performing complicated experiments with uncertain outcomes). 

As a result, students are less able to fulfill even simpler tasks (even things like putting in homework in time), and because of that they are far more easily overwhelmed. Unfortunately, it seems that parents are heavily pushing teachers (and school boards) to address stressed out kids by making things easier, rather than focusing on building resilience.

I am not entirely sure how feminism plays into that, though.

4 hours ago, StringJunky said:

I think diversity of input sources, rather than just consulting Google, as an example, promotes neuroplasticity. When we were at school, pre-Windows, finding sources, getting information from our sources was relatively labour intensive, but it promoted neuroplastic development because more senses were directed at a task. When we oldies (50+) hit on a problem, we can draw on a wider range of skills within ourselves and through media compared to the younger generations.

Not only varied input sources, but learning how to process information in general, I think. I.e. processing vs regurgitating.

[studiot]

8 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I don't think there is so much a social change, but rather driven by practical change.

Are you disputing that a far greater % of women now go out to work instead of being housewives ?

9 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I am not entirely sure how feminism plays into that, though.

I didn't mean to allude to feminism in any way.

Sorry if you thought that.

I am not even sure what feminism is.

 

Perhaps you missed the part where I suggested that what is happening in schools (and colleges) reflects what is happening in society outside ?

[StringJunky]

52 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Not only varied input sources, but learning how to process information in general, I think. I.e. processing vs regurgitating.

Yep.

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, studiot said:

Are you disputing that a far greater % of women now go out to work instead of being housewives ?

No, but I am unsure how it relates to the the observed drop in learning abilities. Could you elaborate?

 

[studiot]

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

No, but I am unsure how it relates to the the observed drop in learning abilities. Could you elaborate?

 

What I am suggesting is that what is happening is schools and what is happening outside schools ie in what I am calling the wider community all are linked to a common cause or trend in society.

That is, of course, different from a causal relationship between each other.