A Contemporary Approach to Quantitative Literacy in a College Mathematics Curriculum.
by
Jay P. Abramson and Matt A. Isom
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Coauthors: Jay P. Abramson and Matt A. Isom

The talk will discuss methods to facilitate the student’s acquisition of quantitative literacy in a freshman level College Mathematics curriculum. The goal is to empower the student to be critical, understand and take charge of our their conclusions when faced with the numbers they are confronted with daily. Some of the activities presented will have evolved from scenarios as seen in CNN.com or Time magazine. Others have been designed to simply capture the student’s imagination or motivate them to think mathematically. Vocabulary is stressed, literacy is mandated. Mathematics is like any other language and the student needs to be taught how to be fluent. We live in a world punctuated with numbers, thus the goal of the talk is teach the student how to be numerate, critical in their view of the numbers that confront them and confident in their ability to interpret, react and enjoy the understanding of the meanings behind the numbers.

This talk was derived from an analysis of a teaching experiment conducted on four MAT 114, College Mathematics courses, team taught with two instructors during the Fall 2004 semester at Arizona State University. All four sections of this course were team taught by Isom and Abramson. Each section had an enrollment cap of 19 students. Due to the fact Isom and Abramson were in the process of writing a textbook for the college mathematics course students did not have a textbook during the course and their only reference materials for the course were their own notes taken during lecturers. Collaborative group activities with students developing solutions for problems were a portion of the normal day-to-day procedure for these classes. Concepts were introduced by the teacher, examples presented, solved and discussed then students were asked to develop solutions for similar problems.

Technology in the form of a graphing calculator was incorporated; both the TI-83 and Casio 9850 graphing calculators were used by the teacher on any given day. A core goal of this experiment was to enhance students’ level of quantitative literacy and understanding numeracy in context. Development of the student’s ability to use the words from mathematics in context to form an argument was an essential skill developed through out the semester.

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Date received: May 11, 2005