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<p>Isn’t that what I just provided in citing the Braxton findings?<br>
Granted, his findings are limited to one expression of “course rigor” (namely the nature of exam questions).</p>
<p>It is very hard to create a mass of critical thinkers. Large research universities never get you there. You do need small settings to achieve that and when a student can’t ask a question in a 200 student class, where does the critical thinking come from? </p>
<p>Performing to the toughest grading standards answers the following - do some schools make it easy on the students to graduate without learning enough. It also answers whether people are getting weeded out from disciplines like chemistry and biology.</p>
<p>Knowledge workers can be on the cutting edge or day to day. People who are on the cutting edge end up in the cutting edge work environments (not always the case but thats where they belong) while the schools that produce day to day ones are feeding the primary needs of this country for every day workers. There is a list of schools floating around where such workers come from - Penn State, Ohio State, Texas A&M, UIUC etc which graduate students in extremely large numbers each year and also provide people trained in the disciplines most employers are looking for (accounting, engineering, management, communications etc).</p>
<p>What they call “critical thinking” questions on exams is not the only factor that goes into course rigor. Also, whether an exam question fits their definition of “critical thinking” is not the only factor that goes into the difficulty of the exam question.</p>
<p>^ Yes, a course could be made “rigorous” (difficult, hard) in many ways. For example, a professor could assign an extremely heavy reading load then test on recall of the of the information with no interpretation of its significance. One could set a steep, arbitrary grading curve. Etc. However, I think it makes sense to associate one’s approach to academic standards (/rigor) with the major pedagogical goals of the institutions one is studying.</p>
<p>Braxton bases his assumptions about the pedagogical goals of liberal arts colleges on the cited research findings of Winter, D., D. McClelland, and A. Stewart (1981). He bases his assumptions about the pedagogical goals of liberal arts colleges on the cited research findings of Platt, G. M., T. Parsons, and R. Kirshstein (1978). I think Braxton has principled reasons for focusing on the testing of critical thinking skills (because the literature apparently indicates these institutions themselves place a high value on developing them).</p>
<p>He bases his definition of “critical thinking” on [Bloom’s</a> Taxonomy](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom’s_Taxonomy]Bloom’s”>Bloom's taxonomy - Wikipedia).
He distinguishes “questions requiring recall or recognition (knowledge level) of course content” from “questions that require a high level of understanding of course content (analysis, synthesis and evaluation)”. This appears to be a well-established framework for describing educational objectives and supporting skills.</p>
<p>He justifies his approach as follows:
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<p>So that’s the specific expectation he’s examining.</p>
<p>However, exam questions that require “critical thinking” may vary considerably in terms of how difficult or rigorous they are. For example, the instructor of a math course may put “prove [something]” on an exam. But there is a wide range of how difficult “[something]” that is to be proved is. Merely being classed as “critical thinking” or not says little about how difficult the exam question is.</p>
<p>^ Sure. And that might be an interesting problem for follow-on research , if only the professors at selective research universities were any likelier to ask critical thinking exam questions at all.</p>
<p>Here’s a broader view of the relationship between selectivity and learning:</p>
<p>[Learning</a> More at Selective Colleges - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/learning-more-at-selective-colleges/28415]Learning”>Innovations: Learning More at Selective Colleges)</p>
<p>Summary:
“Controlling for a range of individual student characteristics, including academic preparation, the authors find that students at selective colleges make stronger gains on the CLA—which measures critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills—than those at less selective institutions.”</p>
<p>By “selective colleges”, the authors don’t appear to be distinguishing the most prestigious few from other “selective” schools:</p>
<p>“Selective institutions are defined as those in which students at the 25th percentile have a combined math and verbal SAT score above 1150, and less selective are those in which students at the 25th percentile have a combined score below 950.”</p>
<p>(This definition appears to include a bigger set of schools than the Barron’s “Most Competitve” category.)</p>
<p>Note, too, the following observation in the cited report:
“There is more variation within institutions than across institutions. Although institutional selectivity is related to students’ experiences and growth in the CLA, high- and low performing students can be found at each institution and within each level of selectivity.”</p>
<p>I appreciate your sharing the study’s definition of “selective,” tk21769. It is rather rare that we on CC discuss schools where combined SAT scores at the 25th percentile are below 950. I certainly assumed the study authors were setting a higher threshold for “selective.”</p>
<p>As far as real life examples, I can also offer real life example.
There is a great representation of Ivy / Elite graduates at Med. Schools because of very high caliber students who attend Ivy / Elite UGs. However, there are students from regualr public state UGs there. There are also few PhD’s, and other advanced degrees at the Med. School. It appears that at the end, IT ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT MATTER. They all are very challenged and have equally difficult time with the shocking academic level. The difference in most cases is in the fact that while very many top caliber students who opted for public state schools or others that gave them full rides or full tuition Merits, others continue accumulating debt by piling up Med. School loans on top on UG loans.</p>
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<p>Please note that I’ve mentioned several different studies. Different authors use different definitions of “selective”. The two by Braxton, one on LACs and one on universities, use the Barron’s classifications. The one by Arum et.al. uses specific SAT score ranges.</p>
<p>The 950 (25th percentile M+CR) represents a ceiling for LESS selective colleges in Arum et.al. Their threshold for more selective colleges is 1150 (25th percentile M+CR). An example of a school with that 25th percentile score is Rhodes College.</p>
<p>Braxton’s threshold for more selective colleges (the SAT scores it takes to get into Barron’s “most competitive”) seems to be somewhat higher than 1150.</p>
<p>Take away message: Attending a more selective college does appear to have measurable, positive “peer effects” on learning, even after adjusting for the qualities of the students entering these schools. The magnitude of these effects may vary depending on how one defines “selective”, precisely what effects you are measuring, and (for at least some effects) the kind of schools you’re comparing. So … I would not be at all confident that one could expect a consistent, significant difference in academic rigor between schools ranked, say, 20 positions apart on the USNWR scale. 100 positions apart? Maybe.</p>
<p>“Selective institutions are defined as those in which students at the 25th percentile have a combined math and verbal SAT score above 1150, and less selective are those in which students at the 25th percentile have a combined score below 950.”</p>
<p>That is really a low threshold for selectiveness if we are to assume SAT is recentering the score at 500 for their median which means 50% should have a 1000 as a start.</p>
<p>When this topic comes up, it often occurs to me that there may be significant differences among disciplines in how much it matters whether you go to a “prestigious” college or not. It does appear to me that it matters a lot for certain disciplines–for example, if you are interested in being an academic music composer. It matters who you study with, not just what you study. It’s my belief that this is also true for people who want to be professors in other fields, like English. It might be less important if you want to be an engineer. These kinds of differences make me question the value of efforts to study potential advantages across the board.</p>
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<p>Then again, perhaps the likelihood of finding “critical thinking” exam questions has more to do with the subject of the course than anything else, but that the difficulty of exam questions (whether classified as “critical thinking” or otherwise) may vary between schools or instructors. Whether an exam question is classified as “critical thinking” is only one dimension of exam difficulty, which is only one dimension of course difficulty. Indeed, the focus on exams ignores other aspects of the course that may be substantial parts of the student work and grading criteria (e.g. term projects, lab work, programming assignments in computer science courses, etc.).</p>
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<p>There are likely significant differences in what courses and majors are offered, regardless of whether there are course by course differences. For example, freshman calculus courses are fairly well standardized (though certainly some instructors may give more or less difficult exam questions), but some more selective schools offer more rigorous honors courses that are not offered at less selective schools due to lack of student interest (and a few highly selective schools have only what others would call honors courses).</p>
<p>In terms of majors, the offerings could also vary. For example, some less selective Texas public universities are considering eliminating the physics major due to lack of student interest (fewer than 5 students per year). Liberal arts subjects in general tend to become less popular at less selective schools. Engineering also tends to be scarce at less selective schools.</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification, tk.</p>
<p>Critical thinking development is responsibility of k -12, College is way too late for that, they need to enter the college with this skill which is more and more required in computer age. We do not need memory tank in each brain (only in some brains, notably in MDs brains, who need to react to some critical situations completely relying on their own Data base stored between their ears), we need critical thinkers who can effectively process tons of information available on computer, who are able to ask correct questions from correct people, who ca analyze the flood of data and pick the right pieces. They need to be ready for that coming to their first class at college. Many profs complain that the level of this ability to think critically has gone down considerably, hence many are not capable to survive in Engineering, CS and other majors and many IT departments are getting very old, filed with pre-retirees or even older who decided to stay in a work force.</p>
<p>The difference in most cases is in the fact that while very many top caliber students who opted for public state schools or others that gave them full rides or full tuition Merits, others continue accumulating debt by piling up Med. School loans on top on UG loans.</p>
<p>Sorry but this is completely wrong. Ivies give financial aid to those who need it. Graduates of Ivies generally have the least debt.</p>
<p>^^^Not if your family happens to be in that donut hole. It is especially the case for people living in the high cost area, like NJ. Dual salary family making 200-300K do not qualify for FA, but after housing and various costs they are able to save up enough to afford 50-60K/yr/student.</p>
<p>oldfort, don’t forget, you are now “rich” in the eyes of the 47%… Don’t you feel lucky now, you make too much to qualify for aid at the Ivies so you get to pay the $50 or $60K. The great thing about it though is that your child will have no debt as sewhappy has pointed out… get it sewhappy, no debt because oldfort is “rich”. Pretty simple math as to why, if true, Ivy graduates have the least amount of debt…</p>
<p>I meant to say that they are NOT able to save up enough to afford 50-60K.</p>