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08/26/2007: "American students are unable to understand simple tasks"

More than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

[ Tell them they're special, lower standards for multiculturalism, feed them psychiatric drugs and television, and now we're surprised they're vegetables. ]

http://home.mesastate.edu/~khaas/assessment/literacy_college_students&printer=1.htm