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Review Of Quantitative Reasoning: Tools For Today's Informed Citizen By A. Sevilla And K. Somers, Aaron G. Montgomery

Numeracy

Alicia Sevilla and Kay Somers, Quantitative Reasoning: Tools for Today’s Informed Citizen. (Emeryville CA: Key College Publishing, 2007). 626 pp. Softcover with Student CD. $79.95 (USA) ISBN 1-931914-90-1. http://www.keycollege.com/catalog/titles/quantitative_reasoning.html

From charts and graphs (Topic 1) to decision making (Topic 21), Quantitative Reasoning offers a good selection of topics that students in a general education mathematics course and other individuals in our society should understand. Organizing the 21 chapters (topics) under the headings of numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, and statistical reasoning, Sevilla and Somers focus their chapters on examples and devote the last 224 pages to 21 Excel activities. Parallel graphic-calculator …

False Positives And Referral Bias: Content For A Quantitative Literacy Course, Stuart Boersma, Teri Willard

Numeracy

An extended study of accuracy in medical screening is presented as a useful application to increase students’ quantitative reasoning skills. Two detailed examples are presented. The first explores the frequency of obtaining false positive results from a medical screening tool while the second examines the issue of referral bias and its effect on the apparent sensitivity and specificity of the screening tool. Results from student assessments indicate that the activity increases one’s ability to define terms such as “false positive” and “false negative” and increases one’s ability to read and compute with information obtained from a two-way table. Teacher assessment …

Quantitative Literacy Across The Curriculum: A Case Study, Benjamin Steele, Semra Kiliç-Bahi

Numeracy

We describe a quantitative literacy (QL) program at Colby-Sawyer College, a small, residential, liberal arts college in New Hampshire. This program has grown rapidly from a traditional math curriculum to a college-wide understanding of quantitative literacy and voluntary participation by many faculty members in all departments. More than 80% of the faculty agreed that it would be useful for students to be able to use quantitative skills in their courses, but only 24 % thought students were capable of doing very well in mathematics. Twenty-three faculty members attended a summer workshop, funded by NSF, DUE # 0633133, in which they …

Quantitative Literacy On The Web Of Science, 1: The Bibliography And Its Role In The History Of This Journal, H L. Vacher, Todd Chavez

Numeracy

Prior to deciding to propose in 2006 that the National Numeracy Network (NNN) publish a new journal for quantitative literacy with their support, the University of South Florida Libraries investigated the publication environment of the field on the Web of Science®. Reproducing part of that study in this paper, we present findings from topic searches (March 2008) for “numeracy,” “quantitative literacy,” and “statistical literacy.” These updated results include a combined bibliography of 338 peer-reviewed articles amongst 210 different journals, by 748 authors from 321 institutions in 25 countries, in a total of 87 subjects (34% of the subject classes in …