Achieve College Success

There is a large gap between high school student preparation and college demands. This is one of the conclusions of the ACT National Curriculum Survey which was given to thousands of educators and released January 23, 2010.

Current high school learning standards do not adequately prepare many students for college. This is one reason why so many students drop or fail out during their first year of college.

The National Governor’s Association and Council of Chief State School Officers recently met to develop “Common Core State Standards.” One of their conclusions was that higher level thinking skills must be taught in high schools to prepare students for college and career success. These skills include reasoning, synthesis, analysis, and problem solving. In other words students need to be taught critical and creative thinking and not just how to memorize and regurgitate.

Many high school teachers are no longer using models for higher level thinking such as Bloom’s Taxonomy or similar systems. Teachers typically challenge students by giving them more work on lower levels of thinking such as recall of information. Even if students are required to recall increasingly larger amounts of information, they will still be functioning on the lowest level of thinking.

Students also need to be taught higher level thinking such as how to analyze a problem, how to see the big picture, and how to judge the accuracy of information. In addition to higher level thinking, students need to be taught soft skills which can be applied to all subjects. For example, they need to know how to set and achieve goals, manage their time effectively, become active and self-directed learners and know how they learn best. This is why I have been training high school teachers and counselors how to teach their students practical how-to study strategies and skills. They receive a user friendly turnkey student success acceleration system including book/workbook, Power Points and instructor’s manual.

Practical Response to Intervention (RTI) strategies are needed for both at-risk and regular students. As educators, let’s start teaching our students the higher level thinking and study skills that they need to succeed in college and in the 21st century workforce.

Copyright 2009. Raymond Gerson

Best regards,

Raymond Gerson

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 7:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.