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Most universities in the United States require undergraduates to take a course in mathematics, but students take these classes with great reluctance, even though it is clear that quantitative analytical skills are becoming more valued in our complex society. A novel way of both sharpening students' analytic skills and emphasizing their importance will be the focus of a new course "Communicating Quantitative Information".
This presentation will discuss the inspiration, institutional context, justification, and first experiences for this course, which satisfies the State University of New York State general education requirement for mathematics/quantitative reasoning. Students will study topics presented in news stories. For example, students will study the use of percentages, comparisons, and context through an article titled "More women than men murdered on the job". In both the headline and the story, the writer compared percentages of percentages to reach an inaccurate conclusion. Similarly, students will be introduced to statistical concepts such as measures of centrality, norms, mean, median, and variance through stories on "Educational high stakes testing"; dimensions of data, comparison and context is approached using "Pre-Challenger shuttle flight data"; and probabilities and correlations are addressed using topics such as "AIDS testing", "Friendly Fire", "Smoking risks" and "Hormone Replacement Therapy".
Students will quickly find that such stories often are published with significant errors of interpretation or omission of critical information. This will provide opportunities for classroom discussion, and encourage students to develop analytic skills that prevent them from being misled by sloppy numeric interpretation. The classroom experience is supplemented by required participation in an on-line forum in which students post questions and critiques about current items in the news. Students gain experiences using spreadsheet, graphing, and general and specialized search tools in a computer classroom. The use of actual stories and topics provides a direct, authentic approach to the task of providing students with basic skills and understandings as well as serving the goal of preparing students for civic engagement, knowing the world in order to change the world.

Stream: Maths, Science and Technology Learning

Paper: Improving Quantitative Reasoning Through Analysis of News Stories