Planning a Conversation about Quantitative Literacy and Teacher Education
Bernard L. Madison
University of Arkansas

Can bad numbers do good? — From Wingspread discussions

The task was ambitious, some would say hopeless: create a productive twoday conversation among thirty scholars—most strangers to the others—about two virtually disjoint—some would say unrelated—components of US education.

One component, teacher education, is a staple of US education, confined in multiple bureaucracies, spread across higher education but governed by schools of education, and firmly entrenched as a national priority. The other, quantitative literacy (QL), has no academic home, is poorly understood and hardly recognized by either academe or the US public, but nonetheless considered important, even critical. And to what end? Better education for QL and for teachers, of course. But what concrete outcomes of the conversation could make a dent in these enormous and operationally unconnected enterprises?

Recommendations from much more extensive conversations about narrower issues are often no more effective than shouting into the wind, so even if the conversation resulted in an unlikely consensus on what should be done, recommendations to educators and policymakers was not a goal.

Rather, beyond the valuable outcome of strangers no longer being strangers, the concrete communal outcome sought was a list of questions that institutions might address to audit their programs of teacher education and QL education: a small beginning step on what is likely a long journey.

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Edited by Bernard L. Madison, University of Arkansas
and Lynn Arthur Steen, St. Olaf College
Published and Distributed by
Mathematical Association of America

CONTENTS
Introduction
Planning a Conversation about Quantitative Literacy and Teacher
Education
Bernard L. Madison . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Reflections on Wingspread Workshop
Lynn Arthur Steen . . . . 11
Keynote Presentation
Reflections on Quantitative Reasoning: An Assessment Perspective
Richard J. Shavelson . . . . . . . . . 27
Commissioned Papers
Humanism and Quantitative Literacy
Robert Orrill . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Arguing with Numbers: Teaching Quantitative Reasoning through
Argument and Writing
Neil Lutsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Fractions and Units in Everyday Life
Alan Tucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Quantitative Literacy and School Mathematics: Percentages and
Fractions
Milo Schield . . . . . . . . . 87
Preparing Students for the Business of the Real (and Highly
Quantitative) World
Corrine Taylor . . . . . . . . . 109
Beyond Calculation: Quantitative Literacy and Critical Thinking about
Public Issues
Joel Best . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Quantitative Literacy for All: How Can We Make it Happen
Hugh Burkhardt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
The Licensure of Teachers for Quantitative Literacy: Who Should Be
Entitled to Teach QL?
Frank B. Murray . . . . . . . 163
Workshop Discussions
Institutional Audit Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
List of Participants. . . . . . . . . 195

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