谈谈美国大学的情况

好不容易读成这本书，总结一些大多数家长想知道的事情

Academically Adrift Limited Learning on College Campuses By Arum, Richard

This book is mainly statistically summary on CLA (Collegiate Learning Assessment)to evaluate college students learning- involving 3 parts: critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing -- most agreeable key skills which should be taught in higher education. Courses focused on these skills are usually mandated by a college's "general education" or "distribution" requirement in the first 2 college years.


Contemporary collegiate culture. 
Students embraced a "credentialist-collegiate orientation" that focused on earning a degree with as little effort as possible. Academic "success" was achieved through "controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload. .. A common way to regulate workload is simply to restrict the amount of time and effort one spends on a course by doing no more than necessary.  Students embraced the cultural scripted of college life in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon's Van Wilder(2002).

The college experience is perceived by many students to be , at its core, a social experience. The collegiate culture emphasizes sociality and encourages students to have fun-to do all things they have not had a chance to do before, or may not have a chance to do after they enter "the real world" of labor market.Faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents are all implicated to a certain extent in accepting or at least partly acquiescing to contemporary collegiate culture.

总结: 当代大学生的文化: 社交经验 买文凭


Factors influenceing learning in higher Education
Factors prior to college entry
Sociodemographic and high school characteristic: Gender; Race/Ethnicity; Parental Education; Parental Occupation; Non-English home language; Two parents household; Number of siblings; Non-white high school; Urbanicity; Geographic region;
Academic preparation: SAT/ACT performance; Number of AP courses Taken; High school grades.

Factors after College Entry
College Experience:
Hours Spent Studying alone: the more the better
Hours Spend studying with Peer:the less the better
Hours spent in A Fraternity/Soroity: the less the better
Field of study: The more toward STEM, the better. The first Science/Math, the second Humanities/Social Science, Engineering/Computer Science not so much, the worst Business, Education/Social work.
Faculty Expectation: the higher the better. Faculty are most directly involved in shaping student experiences.
Reading/Writing Course Requirement: the more demanding, the better. e.g Reading more thn 40 pages a week and write more than 20 pages of a semester.
Percent of College costs by Grant/Schoolships: the more covered, the better.
Institutions Attended:
The final analyses affirm the the important of students' college experiences and institutions attended for their intellectual development.

总结: 好学校有关系

没有那么多的父母知道 "Pygmalion effect"
Pygmalion effect: Pygmalion in the Classroom is a 1968 book by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson about the effects of teacher expectation on student performance.
Reviewing the book, James Rhem wrote: "Simply put, when teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways" -- from wikipedia.

总结: 期望高是好的,但要小心，不要适得其反