College Students’ Numeracy Events in Discussing Public Issues

Abstract

An important consideration in the design and development of numeracy-focused coursework is ensuring that one meets students where they are with respect to both their mathematics background and their existing numeracy practices in relation to public issues. The latter consideration is especially important, given that students already think about such issues in their daily lives, long before we use them as a means for motivating quantitative exploration in the classroom. In this article, I report on a qualitative study of eight college students’ numeracy events—that is, events mediated in some way by quantification–when reasoning in focus groups with three distinct media artifacts concerning public issues. Core findings from the work are that (1) students in the study leveraged their identities and background knowledge to think about and discuss public issues (which corroborates existing research), and (2) numeracy events, when they did occur, primarily consisted of one-time references to or acknowledgements of quantitative information in the article, rather than active use or manipulation of such information. I end by discussing implications of these findings as well as future avenues for research.