Increasing the Relevance to and Engagement of Students in a Quantitative Literacy Course

Summary

Introduction

For the last fourteen years, the Mathematical Sciences Department at Appalachian has offered MAT1010: Introduction to Math as a core mathematics course for nontechnical majors. This course was designed to accomplish several goals:

to engage students, alone and in teams, in solving real-life problems using the mathematics they were taught in high school;

to show students authentic, useful applications of technology, mainly using computers; and

to teach students how to write about technical information, including techniques for incorporating graphs, tables, and other mathematical structures in written documents.

In 1991, we began the development of course materials that would lend themselves to meeting these goals, and in 1993, the first edition of How Do You Know: Using Math to Make Decisions was published. The materials include four basic modules: physical measurement, personal finance, consumer statistics, and resource allocation. Instructors may choose to use all four or instead do three to leave time to cover additional related topics. In 1996, the course materials, including the text and the associated web pages, won first place for quantitative literacy courses in the first Annenburg/ CPB Innovative Programs Using Technology (INPUT) Competition.

In recent years, we have concentrated on keeping the course content timely and relevant, using student-centered and student-posed problems and data to ensure that students take ownership in the mathematics being studied. Our inspiration for further refinements of the course has come from sources like the NCTM Standards and the AMATYC Crossroads documents.