Education Commons^™

Surveying The Landscape Of Numbers In U.S. News, John Voiklis, Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Bennett Attaway, Uduak G. Thomas, Shivani Ishwar, Patti Parson, Laura Santhanam, Isabella Isaacs-Thomas

Numeracy

The news arguably serves to inform the quantitative reasoning (QR) of news audiences. Before one can contemplate how well the news serves this function, we first need to determine how much QR typical news stories require from readers. This paper assesses the amount of quantitative content present in a wide array of media sources, and the types of QR required for audiences to make sense of the information presented. We build a corpus of 230 US news reports across four topic areas (health, science, economy, and politics) in February 2020. After classifying reports for QR required at both the conceptual …

Effects Of Quantitative Literacy On Healthcare Decision-Making: An Aural Context, Robert G. Root, Sonia Bhala

Numeracy

We propose a relationship between sensory modality, numerical formatting, and performance on a survey simulating healthcare decision-making. We examine the current literature on aural health literacy, and specifically aural literacy coupled with health numeracy. We then create a survey instrument called the Bhala test for this purpose and demonstrate that it is moderately internally consistent and provides results that correlate with the NUMi assessment, a widely accepted measure of health numeracy. The quantitative information provided in the Bhala test has two treatments, percentage and natural frequency formats, in an effort to determine which format is easier for subjects to use …

Numeracy And Social Justice: A Wide, Deep, And Longstanding Intersection, Kira Hamman, Victor Piercey, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

We discuss the connection between the numeracy and social justice movements both in historical context and in its modern incarnation. The intersection between numeracy and social justice encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and quantitative topics, but within that variety there are important commonalities. We examine the importance of sound quantitative measures for understanding social issues and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in this work. Particular reference is made to the papers in the first part of the Numeracy special collection on social justice, which appear in this issue.

Learning To Think Slower: Review Of Thinking, Fast And Slow By Daniel Kahneman (2011), Samuel L. Tunstall, Patrick N. Beymer

Numeracy

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 499 pp. ISBN 978-0374275631.

As an expansive review of Kahneman and others' work over the past half-century in understanding human decision-making, Thinking, Fast and Slow provides Numeracy readers much to consider for both pedagogy and research. In this review, we outline Kahneman's core argument—that humans use both rash (emotional) System 1 thinking and slow (logical) System 2 thinking—then discuss how such systems might be addressed in a quantitative literacy classroom.

Connecting Numbers With Emotion: Review Of Numbers And Nerves: Information, Emotion, And Meaning In A World Of Data By Scott Slovic And Paul Slovic (2015), Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic (Eds.). Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2015). 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-87071-776-5.

It is common to view quantitative literacy as reasoning with respect to numbers. In Numbers and Nerves, the contributors to the volume make clear that we should attend not only to how students consciously reason with numbers, but also how our innate biases influence our actions when faced with numbers. Beginning with the concepts of psychic numbing, and then psuedoinefficacy, the contributors to the volume examine how our behaviors when …

Random Number Simulations Reveal How Random Noise Affects The Measurements And Graphical Portrayals Of Self-Assessed Competency, Edward Nuhfer, Christopher Cogan, Steven Fleisher, Eric Gaze, Karl Wirth

Numeracy

Self-assessment measures of competency are blends of an authentic self-assessment signal that researchers seek to measure and random disorder or "noise" that accompanies that signal. In this study, we use random number simulations to explore how random noise affects critical aspects of self-assessment investigations: reliability, correlation, critical sample size, and the graphical representations of self-assessment data. We show that graphical conventions common in the self-assessment literature introduce artifacts that invite misinterpretation. Troublesome conventions include: (y minus x) vs. (x) scatterplots; (y minus x) vs. (x) column graphs aggregated as quantiles; line …

Looking At The Multiple Meanings Of Numeracy, Quantitative Literacy, And Quantitative Reasoning, H. L. Vacher

Numeracy

The subject of this journal goes by a variety of names: numeracy, quantitative literacy, and quantitative reasoning. Some authors use the terms interchangeably. Others see distinctions between them. Study of psycholinguistic and ontological concepts laid out in the literature of WordNet and familiarity with the papers in this journal suggests a vocabulary matrix consisting of four rows (word senses) and three columns (word forms, namely numeracy, QL, and QR). The four word senses correspond to four sets of synonyms: {numeracy}, {numeracy, QL}, {QL, QR}, and {numeracy, QL, QR}. Each of the word forms is polysemous: “numeracy” points to the first, …