The publication by the MAA of a new book, Calculation vs. Context: Quantitative
Literacy and Its Implications for Teacher Education [1],
leads me to return to Quantitative Literacy (QL), a topic that I touched upon
in my column of September, 2005, "Targeting
the math-averse." The MAA has published or made available several
books on QL. The best starting point for those who want to know what it is
and why it is important is still the little volume edited by Lynn Steen, Mathematics
and Democracy: The Case for Quantitative Literacy [2].
This book was followed by a 2001 forum sponsored by the National Council
on Education and the Disciplines on Why Numeracy Matters for Schools and
Colleges. Papers from that conference were published in Quantitative
Literacy [3]. Lynn Steen did the higher education
community a great service by summarizing the insights from this conference
into the MAA Notes volume Achieving Quantitative Literacy: An Urgent Challenge
for Higher Education [4]. Some of the most thought-provoking
questions that come out of this book deal with the connection between Mathematics
and QL as well as questions of assessment: What does it mean to be quantitatively
literate?
In 2004, MAA published a QL textbook, Understanding Our Quantitative
World, by Janet Andersen and Todd Swanson [5].
And, in 2006, it published a Notes volume, Current Practices in Quantitative
Literacy [6], edited by Rick Gillman, that describes
general principles of a college program in QL as well as many different programs
at many different types of institutions.
The latest volume, Calculation vs. Context, is a collection of papers
that came out of a 2007 conference at Wingspread, the Johnson Foundation Conference
Center in Racine, Wisconsin, on the issue of what kind of training in QL should
be given to prospective K-12 teachers. After an introduction by Bernard Madison,
Lynn Steen gives an overview of the threads that emerge in these papers. One
is the debate whether QL should be subdisciplinary, part of the charge to—perhaps
even part of the reason for—the teaching of mathematics, or whether
it should be cross-disciplinary. The strongest argument for QL as subdisciplinary
can be found in the article by Hugh Burckhardt.
I myself am firmly in the camp that sees QL as necessarily cross-disciplinary.
The mathematical community can contribute to understanding QL, and it has
a responsibility to take a leadership role in promoting it, but if mathematics
becomes the sole keeper of QL, then there is a real danger that quantitative
literacy will become entangled with mathematical literacy or, worse, reduced
to formulaic approaches to fixed categories of problems, exactly the opposite
of what QL should be.
The thread that most interests me is the theme of QL as a form of communication.
This is illustrated best in Neil Lutsky's description of the program at Carleton
College that promotes and assesses student ability to draw on quantitative
information to inform and argue a thesis, regardless of the discipline in
which it occurs. This theme is picked up in Milo Schield's description of
student difficulties in unpacking and interpreting statements couched in the
language of percentages, in Alan Tucker's explanation of why students struggle
to understand fractions and what can be done to improve their understanding,
and in Joel Best's argument that there is too little appreciation for the
social context within which data is collected and thus the need for critical
evaluation of numeric evidence.
QL as a form of communication is a useful image. In a phrase used in several
of the definitions of QL, it is a "habit of mind" rather than an
arsenal of technique. As Robert Orrill's article points out, this image also
illuminates the difficulties of spreading QL because we live in a society
that is very ambivalent about communicating through quantitative information.
To too many, it appears opaque and rather suspect. That is the difficulty,
but that is also why it is so essential to promote QL.
A few years ago, I ran a workshop for secondary social studies teachers that
was billed as a workshop on immigration issues. The title carried an underplayed
subhead, "Understanding the Numbers." When the teachers arrived,
they were concerned to learn that we really would be looking at data that
could help to illuminate and inform the policy debates that surround immigration
issues. But by the end of the week, they discovered that accessing and analyzing
this quantitative information was not as daunting as they had feared. They
discovered many ways they could help their own students overcome fear of and
begin to learn to work with numeric information that was relevant to local
and national issues that they cared about.
This should be our goal, to spread awareness of how effective QL can be as
a form of communication, as a means of reaching deeper understanding of our
world and the complex choices we face. We need to reach all K-12 teachers.
We need to make QL part of the college curriculum. We have allies. Many of
those now pressing hardest for QL are in the social sciences. I am proud to
be on the Board of Directors of the National Numeracy Network [7],
an interdisciplinary organization the promotes QL, and I encourage all mathematicians
to think about what QL means for them and for their institutions.
[1] Bernard L. Madison and Lynn Arthur Steen, editors,
Calculation vs. Context: Quantitative Literacy and Its Implications
for Teacher Education, Mathematical Association of America, Washington,
DC, 2008.
[2] Lynn Arthur Steen, editor, Mathematics and Democracy:
The Case for Quantitative Literacy, National Council on Education and
the Disciplines, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2001. (available
from the MAA)
[3] Bernard L. Madison and Lynn Arthur Steen, editors,
Quantitative Literacy: Why Numeracy Matters for Schools and Colleges,
Mathematical Association of America, Washington, DC, 2003.
[4] Lynn Arthur Steen, Achieving Quantitative Literacy:
An Urgent Challenge for Higher Education, MAA Notes
#62, Mathematical Association of America, Washington, DC, 2004.
[5] Janet Andersen and Todd Swanson, Understanding
Our Quantitative World, Mathematical Association of America, Washington,
DC, 2004.
[6] Rick Gillman, editor, Current Practices in
Quantitative Literacy, MAA Notes #70, Mathematical
Association of America, Washington, DC, 2006.
[7] http://serc.carleton.edu/nnn/
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David Bressoud
is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and president-elect of the MAA. You can reach him at bressoud@macalester.edu.
This column does not reflect an official position of the MAA.