Miami UniversityContext

1. What is the status of Quantitative Reasoning programming on your campus?
Miami University has an established program of Faculty learning Communities that have been effective in bringing about institutional change by empowering faculty. (See http://www.units.muohio.edu/celt). A group of 3 senior faculty at Miami University have established a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on the topic of what we call Quantitative Literacy. This FLC includes about a dozen faculty members from across the University who share the goal of promoting quantitative literacy across the curriculum in a way that is analogous to the "writing across the curriculum" efforts.

2. What are the key learning goals that shape your current programming or that you hope to achieve?
Our short range plans are focused on the FLC. Each of the members of this community have the goal of changing at least one course that they teach in a way that incorporates quantitative literacy in a more substantial way. Our longer range goals include changing the undergraduate general education requirement (we call it the Miami Plan for liberal education) to incorporate quantitative resaoning across the curriculum. (Please note that this does not mean that we will require another statistics course, but that there will be courses in all majors that include quantitative reasoning.) Our long range goal is to have a center for quantitative literacy (or reasoning) modeled after our existing center for writing, the Howe Center of Writing Excellence. (See http://www.units.muohio.edu/writingcenter).

3. Do you have QR assessment instruments in place? If so, please describe:
Miami University is very active in the area of assessment. (See http://www.units.muohio.edu/led/Assessment/index.htm). Also, our institutional research group collects the typical statistics about our students. However, we currently have no specific QR assessment instrument.

4. Considering your campus culture, what challenges or barriers do you anticipate in implementing or extending practices to develop and assess QR programming on your campus?
There is always some resistance to the idea of assessment. I suspect that some of this resistance is due to a lack of understanding about how to assess. However here at Miami the culture is changing with regard to assessment. There is an office that helps faculty learn about assessment techniques. The provost has allocated resources to this effort.

5. Considering your campus culture, what opportunities or assets will be available to support your QR initiatives?
The Faculty Learning Community that we will have this academic year will help us at the ground level. The provost is helping to fund this effort. He seems quite interested in quantitative literacy. There is growing interest among the faculty about assessment. We will be applying for some internal funding ($200K-$250K) this fall to establish a Center for QL.