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Numeracy-Activities and Assignment Ideas‹ Numeracy-Web Resources | Numeracy: Main Resource List Take any published table and play for a while with turning it 90 degrees, and converting it and the result with a graphic program into various versions, and then when you have a few examples with clearly different impressions, have students assess them… Or (similarly) graph some existing data in a few different ways, write descriptions to match each one, then (each description and each graph printed on a separate page) shuffle them and give the complete, unordered set to a small group… (not an introductory exercise) Roger Munger’s Document-Based Cases for Technical Communication, has documents with line and bar graphs and call statistics for an ambulance squad for four quarters of 2004 and for 2003, so various numbers to deal with. Other cases in the book are more text-based until the last case, case 7, that deals with using graphics on presentation slides—and that case may help with numeracy. Pulling sample questions from statistics books has actually been one of the more helpful ways to find sample applications that ask students to deal with the numbers themselves—not just problems for computation, but questions of “in this instance, which measure of central tendency is the best one to report, or should several of them be reported, and why”… A helpful place for my students to start is with examples from school. Like your students, mine are not mostly statisticians, but have majors from all over the college, particularly communication and literature (humanities students are drawn to the class as a not too scary sounding place to get some of their math across the curriculum credit). But they all know school, so examples of “on the last quiz, this was the mean, this the mode, this the median, this the standard deviation”--compare it to last semester, or the last quiz, or something similar, and discuss what the stats tell you—has been an understandable way for them to get the statistics. |