Teaching Quantitative Reasoning with the News

Compiled by Stuart Boersma, Central Washington University

Based on material written by Bernard L. Madison, Stuart Boersma, Caren L. Diefenderfer, and Shannon W. Dingman.

What is Teaching Quantitative Reasoning with the News?

This teaching method uses newspaper articles as content for the critical analysis of quantitative information. Being current and relevant, newspaper articles provide students with an easy answer to the question "When will I ever use this?" Quantitative comparisons, graphical analyses, and elementary modeling can all be approached and supported with case studies comprised of media articles.

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Why Teach Quantitative Reasoning with the News?

Quantitative reasoning should be a habit of mind that one engages in regularly. The daily newspaper has numerous examples illustrating the need to be able to deal critically with quantitative information in today's society. Newspaper articles provide a variety of changing contexts which emphasize the relevance of quantitative thinking in everyone's life.

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How to Teach Quantitative Reasoning with the News

By carefully choosing articles and constructing meaningful study questions, an instructor can help students investigate absolute and relative change, make sense of very large (or small) quantities, and extract information from simple mathematical models. Newspaper articles can be used in a variety of effective pedagogical settings and naturally provide numerous different contexts for student exploration, review, and assessment of basic mathematical skills.

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Examples

Examples of teaching quantitative reasoning with the news

References

References for teaching quantitative reasoning with the news