Part 2 of a 5 part series – The Beginning of Information Illiteracy. See Part 1 here.

High school students are not guaranteed success in college when they have completed college-preparatory courses (Conley, p. 4). Preparation for the graduate would come from their high school’s curriculum that would: (a) measure student academic progress; (b) observe the methods in which states, districts, schools, principals, and teachers are educating students; and (c) observe teachers’ adjusting their educating styles (DOE, 2010 p. 8). In high school English, mathematics, and science courses, students have not been taught how “to draw inferences, interpret results, analyze conflicting source documents, support arguments with evidence, solve complex problems that have no obvious answer, draw conclusions, offer explanations, conduct research, and generally think deeply about what they are being taught” (Conley, 2007c, p. 23).

BACKGROUND

Eighty-three per cent of college students who passed developmental reading could, in 2011, “pass their first college social science course” (Boylan & Bonham , 2011, p. 31). Also, in 2011, 77.2% students who passed developmental mathematics, could “also pass their first college mathematics course; and of those passing developmental English, 91.1% also pass their first college English course” (Boylan & Bonham , 2011, p. 31).

SOLUTION

But those courses were not the remedial courses that were for students that were great at writing or mathematics. Remedial courses were meant as a refresher of skills that were already learned in high school but needed a “pre” course to take before the “real” entry-level course would be taken (Boylan & Bonham, 2007). The “pre” courses were known as existing in the institution’s remedial programs and were designed “to compensate for deficiencies in prior learning” (Boylan & Bonham, 2007, p. 2). Developmental education courses were for students who needed to be taught what they had never learned or had forgotten.

References

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Editor’s Note – this article first published in Computer Savviness – and republished with the author’s permission.