Most people think that those who pass the undergraduate admissions exames has already developed cognitive abilities above average and that at the end of the university course their thinking experienced a discrete evolution that allows the person to enjoy greater open-mindedness as well as good communication skills.
But, do the students really evolve their thinking during university studies? What kind of way of thinking is more prevalent among young people today? Below I summarize some sad statistics speaking for themselves:
A research conducted by scholars of Genovard, Beltrán & Rivas (1995), noted that around 40% of students entering university is not able to extract inferences from written material and only a third of them is able to solve a mathematical problem that requires several steps.
Similarly, Saiz (1994) reveals that only 25% of first-year students at the university owns the necessary abstract and logical thinking skills.
Studies developed by Saenko (2005) reveal that 76.7% of students nourish an esoteric thought rooted in false beliefs and/or superstitions.
And at the end comes a study realized by Ramirez (1993), that’s probably the most daunting of all, in which were examined the university students of the first and the last year of various university courses belonging to the social and technical sciences, the result is as follows: no significant differences were seen in the development of their reasoning skills!
What a sad picture….
