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Peer Review, Summer 2004
Setting Greater Expectations for Quantitative
Learning*
By Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association
of American Colleges and Universities |
The Greater Expectations initiative focuses on important
outcomes of college-level learning, outcomes that are intended
more powerfully to prepare students for lives of creative
and thoughtful intelligence, professional excellence, and
engaged citizenship. The initiative calls for
- Articulation of and focus on forms of learning that are
widely needed in the modern world;
- A new intentionality about addressing expectations for
student achievement across successive levels of learning,
from school through college;
- Involvement of students in "authentic assignments,"
i.e., the kinds of tasks that actually develop complex abilities
while showing students how those abilities can be used with
power in real contexts;
- Transparent assessments, linked to authentic assignments,
that emphasize what students can do with their knowledge
rather than their ability to pass standardized tests;
- Connection of desired capabilities to learning in each
student's major, so that study in the major becomes
an essential vehicle not only for developing those capabilities
but also for learning how to put them to use.
What do these premises imply for fostering quantitative literacy
through school and college learning? Here are my proposals
for educational change:
Create a public and policy dialogue about the uses
of quantitative literacy.
The first change is to identify the ways in which quantitative
literacies are actually used in contemporary society. But
this should be more than an academic discussion; we must spark
a broader public and policy dialogue about the need to recast
and broaden our expectations for the quantitative literacy
of the citizenry.
Identify kinds of learning.
The second change is to move beyond typologies of numeracy
to a delineation of the kinds and levels of learning that
need to be addressed, both in school and college, if students
are actually to be held accountable for developing usable
capabilities in quantitative reasoning and problem solving.
Here again, the discussions should include policy and civic
leaders as well as teachers and scholars.
Rethink high school mathematics.
The third change is to acknowledge the need to substantially
retool the high school mathematics curriculum as well as the
preparation of the teachers who provide that curriculum. High
school study must lay a foundation for statistical as well
as mathematical understanding. And it needs to incorporate
context-rich practices that enable students to learn essential
skills and discover why and for what purpose these skills
matter.
Rethink college quantitative literacy requirements.
The fourth change is to recognize that, at the college level,
no one course of study can realistically develop all the major
kinds of quantitative literacies. We need to stop thinking
that remedying our quantitative deficiencies is simply a matter
of "fixing" mathematics standards and the corresponding
curriculum.
Encourage alternative pathways.
Instead--the fifth change--we need to design multiple
courses of study, each well structured to foster quantitative
strategies used in specific kinds of professional and civic
contexts. The analogy is to writing. Although all educated
people need certain kinds of writing abilities, successful
people actually deploy very different rhetorics depending
on the context. Scientists, for example, make highly field-specific
written arguments; politicians frame their written arguments
in very different terms. We should allow college students
to develop quantitative strengths keyed to their actual interests,
even at the cost of underdeveloping other possible abilities
that, realistically, they are unlikely actually to use.
Embed quantitative literacy in other fields.
The sixth change follows from the fifth. It is time to give
up on the stand-alone general education mathematics requirement.
The great majority of colleges and universities, whether research-
or teaching-oriented, still insist that most students take
such a course (usually selected from a limited menu of options)
as a requirement for graduation. But very little is actually
accomplished through this traditional approach to quantitative
reasoning, and we must fundamentally rethink it. One promising
strategy is to make field-related quantitative competence
the standard, holding students accountable for evidence of
developed ability to actually use quantitative reasoning in
ways keyed to their major field(s) of study.
This sixth proposal may give the reader pause. Suppose the
student's field of study seems not to require quantitative
abilities. What about English, the paradigmatic non-quantitative
major?
The tough question is how to bring all fields into dialogue
with the modern world. Even as I was majoring in history in
the late 1960s, and assiduously avoiding all quantitative
courses, my field was actually moving in a decidedly quantitative
direction. Most fields are becoming more quantitative, reflecting
trends in the world at large. All curricula must adapt to
these realities. Today many history departments hold students
accountable for knowledge of quantitative methods. Tomorrow
(or at least in a few years) English departments, already
infused with richly sociocultural concerns, must recognize
and engage their students' need for quantitative literacy
as well.
Moreover, there is a discernible trend on college campuses
toward minors and double majors. Colleges might insist that
students choose at least one area of concentrated study, whether
a major or a minor, that requires and fosters quantitative
competence.
Whatever strategy we choose, we must recognize that it really
is malpractice to allow students to slip through college without
developing the ability to use quantitative strategies to examine
significant questions. We are only shortchanging our graduates
with respect to the actual demands of a numbers-infused world.
* An earlier version of this article appeared in Mathematics
and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: National Council on Education
and the Disciplines, 2001). The views expressed are the author’s
own. |
