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Numeracy-BooksNumeracy: Main Resource List | Numeracy-Articles and Chapters › How to Think Straight about Psychology by Stanovich; it’s very strong on pseudoscience and correlation/causation fallacies. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg raises some interesting arguments about the use of statistics by folks on both sides of debates about global warming, CFCs, diversity, etc. He gives links to his data so that students can analyze how Lomborg himself has been using the numbers rhetorically. SEE ALSO (for an opposing view) http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/of/ Trust in Numbers by Theodore Porter is also excellent; it focuses more on the historical context of how statistics have come to dominate public decision-making. Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos is a great book on the rhetorical side. http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/books.html Calculus and Pizza was a great find for my mathematician father. http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/calcad.html Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics (1977) by Wheeler is now out of print, but still good. Freakanomics is an easy read. http://www.freakonomics.com/reviews.php Relearning Mathematics (1989) by Marilyn Frankenstein’s which is to math as Freire is to writing. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, also by Paulos: http://www.ams.org/notices/199603/comm-kolata.pdf The Chicago Guide to Writing About Numbers (U of Chicago Press, 2004)by Jane E. Miller’s http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16452.ctl How to think about statistics by John L. Phillips, Freeman Press. The Practice of Social Research by Earl Babbie is quite a good general textbook. Sections are relevant to planning to collect data and developing an analytic model. Statistics as Principled Argument by Robert Abelson is an excellent rhetorical approach. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. News and Numbers, by Victor Cohn and Lewis Cope. Presenting Numbers, Tables, and Charts, by Sally Bigwood and Melissa Spone, Oxford UP, 2003. Designing Visual Language by Kostelnick and Roberts For designing effective graphs and tables, that make arguments about numbers, an excellent book is Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few. Few uses Tufte-like principles and helps writers execute graphs and tables that follow those principles. The down side is that he focuses almost exclusively on business contexts rather than scientific or technical contexts. Numeracy: Main Resource List | Numeracy-Articles and Chapters › |