Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, By Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, And Ola Rosling., Richard L. Goerwitz Iii

Numeracy

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (New York, NY: Flatiron Books). 352 pp. ISBN 978-1250107817. Also available in audio and e-book formats.

Rosling et al.’s Factfulness is built around a thirteen-question public-health, environment, and population survey that nobody scores well on, not even people who should know better (for example, academics, politicians, diplomats, and business leaders): We all utterly fail to appreciate key ways in which the earth is steadily becoming a better place for people to live. Despite its title, and …

Taking Multiple Regression Analysis To Task: A Review Of Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking, By Richard Nisbett (2015), Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Richard Nisbett. 2015. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.(New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). 336 pp. ISBN: 9780374536244

Nisbett, a psychologist, may not achieve his stated goal of teaching readers to “effortlessly” extend their common sense when it comes to quantitative analysis applied to everyday issues, but his critique of multiple regression analysis (MRA) in the middle chapters of Mindware is worth attention from, and contemplation by, the QL/QR and Numeracy community. While in at least one other source, Nisbett’s critique has been called a “crusade” against MRA, what he really advocates is that it not be used as …

Decisions, Decisions: Review Of Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking By Richard E. Nisbett, Anne Kelly

Numeracy

Richard Nisbett. 2015. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). 336 pp. ISBN: 9780374536244.

Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett provides help in identifying and overcoming faulty cognitive strategies and replacing them with more accurate heuristics. To do so, Nisbett draws from statistics, correlation, experiments, differences in Western and Eastern thought, and, especially, social influence.

How Do We Change Statistical And Critical Thinking Attitudes In Young People?, Rhys C. Jones

Numeracy

A quasi-experimental design was used to measure the impacts on student attitudes in statistics, mathematics and critical thinking (16-18 years of age) on a group of students who received a 21-week-long contextualised statistics course (called the Pilot Scheme in Social Analytics), in South Wales. This paper will discuss the development and delivery stages of the course as well as the student recruitment strategies employed. This paper will also discuss the changes in attitudes observed after the course had finished. Results suggest the course did lead to changes in the students’ attitudes becoming more positive with respect to statistics, mathematics, and …