For many generations, schools and universities taught mathematics. But only since the latter half of the 20th century, this ‘classical’ education started to re-focus somewhat towards the competencies afforded by numeracy. Numeracy (or rather innumeracy) became a concern when multiple international surveys revealed numerous weaknesses and inadequacies in people’s ability to reason with quantitative information in contexts that are directly related to their lives.

There have been numerous attempts to conceptualize numeracy (aka quantitative reasoning, quantitative literacy). In this introductory session, we will suggest an alternative approach to thinking about numeracy, which - among other benefits - suggests an approach to teaching of numeracy through the focus on the numeracy tasks.

After challenging the audience to reflect on, and criticize, our suggestions for numeracy tasks, we will suggest a rubric that can be used to determine whether or not a given task is a good numeracy task.

Bios:

Andie Burazin has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and a M.Sc. in Mathematics from McMaster University. At the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), she is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Numeracy Specialist with the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy and the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences. For several years, she has been teaching and providing mathematics and numeracy support to undergraduate students and has actively participated in research and outreach to better enhance teaching and learning of her students.

Taras Gula, professor of mathematics and statistics at George Brown College, has developed on-line practice tools in statistics, foundational mathematics and health numeracy. His interests include research into numeracy, statistical thinking and reasoning, hugelkultur and growing garlic. He has worked with nurses, early childhood educators, inter-professional educators and others on research projects in mathematics and statistics education. Taras has mentored a number of students working on different numeracy projects.

Miroslav Lovric is a professor of mathematics at McMaster University. His research interests include Riemannian geometry, mathematics and medicine and mathematics education. Miroslav has taught mathematics to a wide variety of students from almost every program at his university, and elsewhere. He created a much-needed numeracy course at his university and has been collaborating on creating a health numeracy app for health care professionals. Miroslav is an active member of the community of university math and stats instructors. Besides mathematics, his greatest passion is traveling.