Achieving Quantitative Literacy

Presents a wide sampling of efforts being made on campuses across the country to achieve our common goal of having a quantitatively literate citizenry.

This book features 85 interesting and exciting multi-century and multicultural web sites that are accompanied by numerical critical thinking questions and activities. Teachers can pose the questions to their entire class or individually assign them. It also contains lists of best practices and examples for interpreting, visualizing, and displaying quantitative data. History and social sciences educators will find this book an indispensable tool for incorporating numerical literacy skills into their class activities and assignments.

This book provides professional development leaders and teachers with a framework for integrating authentic real-world performance tasks into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms. We incorporate elements of problem-based learning to engage students around grand challenges in energy and environment, place-based leaning to motivate students by relating the problem to their community, and Understanding by Design to ensure that understanding key concepts in STEM is the outcome. Our framework has as a basic tenet interdisciplinary STEM approaches to studying real-world problems. We invited professional learning communities of science and mathematics teachers to bring multiple lenses to the study of these problems, including the sciences of biology, chemistry, earth systems and physics, technology through data collection tools and computational science modeling approaches, engineering design around how to collect data, and mathematics through quantitative reasoning. Our goal was to have teachers create opportunities for their students to engage in real-world problems impacting their place; problems that could be related to STEM grand challenges demonstrating the importance and utility of STEM. We want to broaden the participation of students in STEM, which both increases the future STEM workforce, providing our next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, as well as producing a STEM literate citizenry that can make informed decisions about grand challenges that will be facing their generation. While we provide a specifi c example of an interdisciplinary STEM module, we hope to do more than provide a single fish. Rather we hope to teach you how to fish so you can create modules that will excite your students.

This book provides two conceptual frameworks for further investigation of map literacy and fills in a gap in map literacy studies, addressing the distinction between reference maps and thematic maps and the varying uses of quantitative map literacy (QML) within and between the two. The text offers two conceptual frameworks and uses specific map examples to explore this variability in map reading skills and knowledge, with the goal of informing educational pedagogy and practices within geography and related disciplines. The book will appeal to cartographers and geographers as a new perspective on a tool of communication they have long employed in their disciplines, and will also appeal to those involved in the educational pedagogy of information and data literacy as a way to conceptualize the development of curricula and teaching materials in the increasingly important arena of the interplay between quantitative data and map-based graphics. The first framework discussed is based on a three-set Venn model, and addresses the content and relationships of three “literacies” – map literacy, quantitative literacy and background information. As part of this framework, the field of QML is introduced, conceptualized, and defined as the knowledge (concepts, skills and facts) required to accurately read, use, interpret and understand the quantitative information embedded in geographic backgrounds. The second framework is of a compositional triangle based on (1) the ratio of reference to thematic map purpose and (2) the level of generalization and/or distortion within maps. In combination, these two parameters allow for any type of map to be located within the triangle as a prelude to considering the type and level of quantitative literacy that comes into play during map reading. Based on the two frameworks mentioned above, the pedagogical tool of “word problems” is applied to “map literacy” in an innovative way to explore the variability of map reading skills and knowledge based on specific map examples.