[saraid216]

I might be reading you incorrectly, but what you appear to be saying is that the ability to "find and organize information" doesn't give you the "necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond high school". Can you substantiate this claim at all? Are any of your students significantly capable of "skill-based learning" and yet require your particular instruction?

And can you experimentally control for this outside of your own particular students? In other words, can you say that there's no correlation between their ability and your teaching skill?

[sandworm]

Well I probably should have said "necessary reading abilities to acquire topics through available means."

They are capable of understanding the topics. They have problems with sitting down and learning the topic through reading vast amounts of text. It is all well and good to have professors or search engines boil things down to bullet points for easy absorption, but some topics (law, literature, medicine, physics, religion, history) require the reading of original text. That text could be 100 years old and cover hundreds of pages. Understanding it sufficiently to discuss and debate with others means spending hours, days, doing nothing but reading. No cooperation, no building teams, just you and a book/screen. The students I see, products of modern highschools, lack that skill.