Chapter 1 (continuation)

The last two dimensions of college and career readiness include: "academic behaviors" and "contextual skills and awareness (college knowledge)".

Conley explains how academic behaviors in college are far more complex than those in high school. Students are now supposed to be more aware of themselves, their surroundings, their resources, their thinking, and overall, their academic priorities. "Key skills" must be mastered; students must improve on (or actually start) studying , effective time management, note-taking, and self-awareness.

The last dimension on college knowledge implies on the "culture" of college and not so much the courses. Students must not only know how to navigate through the trials that involves starting college (economically, socially, and academically). Conley emphasizes how students shouldn't think of college as a means to "disown [their] own cultural backgrounds, heritage, and traditions," but rather, as a means to mesh, complement, and synthesize (41).

Chapter 1

Common factors behind successful "college and career readiness" include good reading and writing skills, and Conley notes the differences between the demands of reading/writing in high school and college. In college, students read much more, are required to understand and decipher more complex texts, and are challenged by new critical thinking modes and questions of their texts. In writing for college, students are required to finish longer works in much shorter amounts of time, and arguments, points of view, and thorough research are usually required (not to mention good use of mechanics and grammar).

Chapter 1 discusses the "four dimensions of college and career readiness," and they include:

(For this blog entry, we will discuss the first two.)

1. Key Cognitive Strategies

2. Key Content Knowledge

3. Academic Behaviors

4. Contextual Skills and Awareness

The core of these are key cognitive strategies, and the majority of first year students, as Conley noted, struggled with critical thinking and problem solving. Students must be aware of the continuous demands of courses, their own ways of thinking, and effective approaches to different academic scenarios like effective research, problem and answer development, interpretation, and communication. "The entering college student either struggles mightily until these strategies begin to develop or misses out on the largest portion of what college has to offer, which is how to think about the world" (35).

The second dimension is that of content knowledge. Conley notes that unlike most of the rest of the world, the United States' postsecondary institutions require general education courses for all students. In other countries, students simply jump into their "major," which sometimes begins in some form of specialized high school curriculum. American students must follow through with the core subjects, the "basics," of English, Math, Science, the Social Sciences, Languages, and the Arts. In all of these, of course, students must employ the skills as mentioned above, including successful execution of writing/reading demands and tasks.

David T. Conley's "College & Career Ready" Intro. (Response & Inquiry)

So, in the book intro, Conley mentions students in high school tend to base their course choices on comfort (friends in class), or they are categorized by their faculty/administration based on their "race, ethnicity, income, or gender" (3). So, ultimately the outcome or product of this is that they have a high school diploma seen more "as a measure of social compliance than academic skills" (3). Which brings us to the ultimate question: Are students who are labeled college ready, really ready for college? This does however exclude career readiness from the title of the book, but in this portion I would like to focus on college readiness or "post-secondary readiness", not focusing specifically on college admission, which in itself is an enormous time consuming complex task to many students. So students focus on the issue at hand which is getting into college (college admission), rather than focusing on college experience and academic expectations by faculty/administration.