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Education Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2015

Numeracy

Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research

Science literacy

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Full-Text Articles in Education

The Quantitative Reasoning For College Science (Quarcs) Assessment, 1: Development And Validation, Katherine B. Follette, Donald W. Mccarthy, Erin Dokter, Sanlyn Buxner, Edward Prather Jul 2015

The Quantitative Reasoning For College Science (Quarcs) Assessment, 1: Development And Validation, Katherine B. Follette, Donald W. Mccarthy, Erin Dokter, Sanlyn Buxner, Edward Prather

Numeracy

Science is an inherently quantitative endeavor, and general education science courses are taken by a majority of college students. As such, they are a powerful venue for advancing students’ skills and attitudes toward mathematics. This article reports on the development and validation of the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) Assessment, a numeracy assessment instrument designed for college-level general education science students. It has been administered to more than four thousand students over eight semesters of refinement. We show that the QuaRCS is able to distinguish varying levels of quantitative literacy and present performance statistics for both individual items and …