Literature Review #3

Citation:
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2011. Print.

Summary:
Academically Adrift provides reasonings and statistics for the shortcomings of college students in classes and in their intellectual development. One specific reason is that college students may be stuck in a "directionless drift" in which they struggle deciding which major to pursue and thus either select low-level classes or are disengaged from their classes. The statistics in Arum and Roksa's research are fascinating.

Author:
Richard Arum - Professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is also director of the Education Research Program of the Social Science Research Council and the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools.
Josipa Roksa - Assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.


Quotes:
“no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study,” (Arum & Roksa 36).

"‘their delay is characterized more by indecision than by motivated reflection, more by confusion than by the pursuit of clear goals, more by ambivalence than by determination,’” (Arum & Roksa 75). 

“half of seniors report that they have not written a paper longer than twenty pages in their last year of college” (Arum & Roksa 37).

“...approximately one-fifth of seniors, as well as freshmen, report coming to class “frequently” unprepared and indicate that their institutions give little emphasis to academic work,” (Arum & Roksa 37).

“their Facebook and Twitter accounts while – or instead of – taking notes in class. Indeed, in a recent study, students reported that they spend on average between 125 (white students) and 131 (African-American students) hours on various activities Monday through Friday, even though the school/work week has only 120 hours,” (Arum & Roksa 97).

Relation to my topic:
The concept of directionless drift offers one example of how college student tend to make poor long-term choices in college that affect their intellectual development. Students should be forgiven for uncertainty about their majors, but they curtail their own learning when they choose light classes and are disengaged in class. The most interesting research applicable to my essay is that "half of seniors report that they have not written a paper longer than twenty pages in their last year of college," even though in Making the Most of College, Richard J. Light finds that the correlation between writing-extensive classes and student engagement “is stronger than the relationship between students’ engagement and any other course characteristic…. Courses with more than twenty pages of final-draft writing per semester draw nearly twice as much time as courses with no formal writing assignments. The more writing required, the more time students commit.” In my essay, this correlation between engagement of students by writing classes and lack of writing accomplishment in college show that college students avoid the challenging writing classes even though they will be more engaged.