U.S. students feeling unchallenged in the classroom, study finds

Academic rigor is apparently missing in some U.S. classrooms. At least that’s the answer you’ll get when you ask students, according to a new report published by the Center for American Progress. Using the student questionnaire from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal survey and report also known as the Nation’s Report Card, the researchers found that students failed to be challenged by their school work, with less than 50 percent of high school seniors saying they are always or almost always learning something in math class.

The paper’s authors, Ulrich Boser and Lindsay Rosenthal, note that academic rigor, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects, is critical to the future of the country's continued economic success: “For today’s students, being prepared for college and the modern workforce means having access to high-quality curriculum materials in critical subject areas like math and science. But our analysis found that most teenagers say their schools don’t provide important learning opportunities in science and technology.” Additionally, the survey data indicated that a whopping 72 percent of eighth-grade students said they were not learning anything about engineering and technology. Considering the ongoing push to strengthen education in the STEM subjects in U.S. schools, such findings are troublesome, especially in a “competitive global economy where the mastery of science is increasingly crucial,” as noted in a summary of the report.

The researchers offered up three recommendations for educators and stakeholders to consider in addressing the problems outlined in their analysis:

• Educators and researchers should develop and administer student surveys to provide themselves with a better look at the “student experience.”
• Policymakers should press for higher, more rigorous academic standards for school curricula, with the author’s pointing to the Common Core Standards as one good example of such guidelines.
• The nation needs to work on academically engaging youths and “figure out ways to provide all students with the education that they deserve.”