It appears that the self and society courses had a marginal effect on students' abilities to think about the welfare dependency issue depicted in the article. We found few exemplary answers for both questions, but a large percentage of the responses merely repeated information stated in the newspaper article. On the other hand, fewer students than expected invoked popular stereotypes of welfare recipients as lazy, immoral, freeloading, or about welfare as a wasteful system that encourages these kinds of behavior and attitudes, etc. Overall, students' answers were underdeveloped, revealing only a very rudimentary understanding of the social context of human actions, attitudes and values. The results of the Self and Society test are similar to those of the General Education Science Test conducted in 1996, which also showed a relatively rudimentary understanding of science and scientific experimentation.
General education tries to prepare students to think critically.
We hope that students are able to analyze information in the popular media and to develop well-reasoned, informed positions. One possibility is that skillful thinking is difficult to acquire, and that a single social science course is unlikely to have a profound influence on social science reasoning. Perhaps, the test should be given to students at the end of their undergraduate education after they have been able to integrate concepts from a variety of disciplinary areas. A second possibility is that self and society classes do not prepare students for broad, real-life problem solving. Our hunch is that the courses focus on specific content of the respective disciplines, and do not engage students in problem solving.