Why a liberal arts mathematics book with a quantitative literacy focus?
How do you engage students with the study of math? Crauder, Evans, Johnson, and Noell have found the answer: Help them become intelligent consumers of the quantitative data to which they are exposed every day—in the news, on TV, and on the Internet.
In an age of record credit card debt, opinion polls, and questionable statistics, too few students have mastered the basic mathematical concepts required to think about and evaluate data. Quantitative Literacy: Thinking Between the Lines develops the idea of rates of change as a key concept in helping students make good personal, financial, and political decisions.
The goal of Quantitative Literacy is a more informed generation of college students who think critically about the data provided to them, the images shown to them, the facts presented to them, and the offers made to them. Quantitative Literacy shows students the mathematics that matters to them: their bank account, their medical tests, their daily news feed. It also develops their mathematical thinking, helping them to understand the difference between truthful and misleading mathematical reporting.