How well of a genius are you?
It's a frequent Boomer lament: "Kids these days don't know much about ____ " (fill in the blank: geography, culture, science, art, history). In bad news for Millennials, a new study suggests that those annoying Boomers might be right.
Boomers might be right. Kent State University professors John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson compared the general knowledge of 671 college students in 2012 versus a cohort tested by Thomas Nelson and Louis Narens back in 1980. By using Nelson and Narens' same 300 questions, Dunlosky and Rawson were interested in establishing new norms for general knowledge that could be used by other researchers (e.g., those studying memory loss). For example, it's perfectly logical that most college students today don't have a clue about era-specific pop culture trivia, such as the identity of the cartoon character Popeye or Lone Ranger's sidekick Tonto.