Science and Mathematics Education Commons^™

Calculus Of The Impossible: Review Of The Improbability Principle (2014) By David Hand And The Logic Of Miracles (2018) By Lásló Mérő, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

David J. Hand. 2014. The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0374175344.

Lásló Mérő. 2018. The Logic of Miracles: Making Sense of Rare, Really Rare, and Impossibly Rare Events (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0300224153.

David Hand and Lásló Mérő both grapple with the occurrence of seemingly impossible events in these two popular science books. In this comparative review, I describe the two books, and explain why I prefer Hand's treatment of the impossible.

An Interdisciplinary Approach To Understanding Predator-Prey Relationships In A Changing Ocean: From System Design To Education, Ileana M. Freytes-Ortiz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is ecologically and socially complex, deemed the most important issue of our generation. Through this dissertation I have approached climate change research through an interdisciplinary perspective, investigating how this phenomenon will affect marine ecological systems, how we can better develop experimental systems to answer ecological questions, and how we can effectively educate about this issue.

In Chapter 2, I provided accessible alternatives for researching the effects of climate change (elevated temperatures and pCO2) on marine ecosystems. I designed, built, and troubleshooted two accurate and inexpensive climate-controlled experimental systems capable of maintaining target conditions: a temperature-controlled system and an …

Survey Research In Postsecondary Chemistry Education: Measurements Of Faculty Members’ Instructional Practice And Students’ Affect, Rebecca E. Gibbons

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Collection of data through survey-type measurements and analysis contributes rich, meaningful information to the chemical education research enterprise. This dissertation reports two strands of research that each contribute a “snapshot” of the state of chemical education on two different levels. The first uses survey research methods, collecting data from faculty members to learn about postsecondary chemistry education across the United States. The second uses survey instruments of student achievement emotions within the organic chemistry classroom, collecting longitudinal data to learn about the relationships of emotions with achievement over time. Both areas are of interest because chemical education research produces evidence-based …

Models As Weapons: Review Of Weapons Of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy By Cathy O’Neil (2016), Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York, NY: Crown) 272 pp. ISBN 978-0553418811.

Accessible to a wide readership, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy provides a lucid yet alarming account of the extensive reach of mathematical models in influencing all of our lives. With a particular eye towards social justice, O’Neil not only warns modelers to be cognizant of the effects of their work on real people—especially vulnerable groups who have less power to fight back—but also encourages laypersons to take initiative …

Why I Believe People Need Painting By Numbers, Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Jason Makansi.2016. Painting By Numbers: How to Sharpen Your BS Detector and Smoke Out the Experts (Tucson AZ: Layla Dog Press). 196 pp. ISBN 978-0998425900.

This piece briefly introduces my Painting By Numbers, which aims to take the core messages of the QL/QR community from academic and professional circles to the rest of the citizenry. I describe the book in the context of the critical need for the most basic numeracy tools to help consumers of news, information, and analysis—delivered through traditional and contemporary social media outlets—determine where a reported numerical result lies on the scale from utter nonsense …

Quantitative Map Literacy: A Cross Between Map Literacy And Quantitative Literacy, Ming Xie, H. L. Vacher, Steven Reader, Elizabeth Walton

Numeracy

We define quantitative map literacy (QML), a cross between map literacy and quantitative literacy (QL), as the concepts and skills required to accurately read, use, interpret, and understand the quantitative information embedded in a geospatial representation of data on a geographic background. Long used as tools in technical geographic fields, maps are now a common vehicle for communicating quantitative information to the public. As such, QML has potential to stand alongside health numeracy and financial literacy as an identifiable subdomain of transdisciplinary QL.

What concepts and skills are crucial for QML? The obvious answer is, “It depends on the type …