"Get Real!" Assessing for quantitative literacy


Authors: 
Wiggins, G.
Year: 
2001
Publisher: 
New York TImes
Abstract: 

The result of students' endless exposure to typical tests is a profound lack of understanding about what mathematics is:"Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the whole area of mathematics concerns students' misapprehension of what isactually at stake when they are posed a problem. . . . [S]tudents are nearly always searching for [how] to follow the algorithm. . . . Seeing mathematics as a way of understanding the world . . . is a rare occurrence."9 Surely this has more to do with enculturation via the demands of school, than with some innate limitation.10

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education