Measuring Habits of Mind: Toward a Prompt-less Instrument for Assessing Quantitative Literacy

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Mathematics

Publication Date

1-2-2013

Abstract

In this study, we offer a new “prompt-less” instrument for measuring students’ habits of mind in the field of quantitative literacy. The instrument consists of a series of questions about a newspaper article the students read. The questions do not explicitly solicit quantitative information; students’ habit of mind is assessed by their use of quantitative reasoning even when it is not asked for. Students’ answers were graded according to a modified version of the Quantitative Literacy Assessment Rubric (QLAR) published in this journal (vol. 4, issue 2). We applied the instrument and rubric to assess pre- and post-intervention habits of mind in opportunistic samples of two cohorts of students: the general (non-STEM) student body and (non-STEM) honors students at Central Washington University. The intervention was a QL course designed around a collection of newspaper articles to provide authentic context. The pre- and post-course assessment showed no statistically significant improvement in either group. We close with a discussion of practical aspects of using the rubric based on our experience of using it in this QL class.

Comments

This article was originally published open access in Numeracy.

Journal

Numeracy

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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