Quantitative Reasoning

Bernard Madison talks about the need for college graduates and indeed all adults to become "critical consumers of numbers". He spoke at the Mathematics-Across-the-Curriculum/Quantitative Reasoning Conference at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. You can find a video of his address at the previous link.

One thing that he said stood out to me and I paraphrase: It is not so much the level of mathematics, but the difficulty of the context that determines how well people do.

This is no only the case with the transference of maths/numeracy "skills" from academic to everyday/work contexts. It is also very much the case with the transference of  "skills" among the various academic disciplines.

For example, students who have had a throrough grounding in graphical work in formal mathematics are still often unable to critically analyse and interpret graphs in other academic or everyday contexts.

Much of what Madison discusses in this video has great bearing on our understanding of adult numeracy performance in real-life contexts.

It also, once again, puts a question mark over the numeracy progressions and how they might be implemented. There is no doubt the as the progression are used by tutors, it must be in rich meaningful contexts.

However, there may be problems in trying to teach numeracy in rich contexts within classroom or institutional settings. Students, including adults, have certain expectations of what mathematics should "look like" and may well resist attempts to teach maths in highly contextualised ways.

Here is a 2006 paper by Ginsberg, Manly and Schmitt that addresses some of these issues.