The Second Decade of Numeracy: Entering the Seas of Literacy

This multipurpose editorial explores and tries to count the many types of literacy that are referred to by name in Wikipedia and Numeracy. Wikipedia’s Category:Literacy page identifies 44 kinds of literacy that are the subject of articles, ranging from numeracy and graphicacy to braille literacy and diaspora literacy. In addition, searching Google finds more than 30 adjective-literacy or noun-literacy collocations, including quantitative literacy, adult literacy, and document literacy, that do not have Wikipedia pages of their own but are mentioned on other Wikipedia pages. The sum puts this modest literacy count in line with the more than 70 bodies of water called “seas” according to the International Hydrographic Organization and thus suggests Seventy Seas of Literacy as apt for a metaphoric Literacy World Ocean. As for Numeracy, full-text searching using the bepress search tools provided on the journal’s landing page identifies at least 15 types of literacies, ten of which were used as keywords. The search also finds six different adjective- or noun-numeracy collocations in Numeracy, including adult numeracy, health numeracy, and situated numeracy, disproportionately used by international authors. The facility of making numeracy collocations prompts the notion of a metaphoric Sea of Numeracy as a candidate to be one of Seven Seas of Literacy. Extending the metaphor, the numeracy collocations would be fertile, life-sustaining estuaries along the coast of the numeracy sea, where seawater from numeracy mixes with freshwater inflow from the disciplinary or cultural contexts identified by the modifier in the collocation. In addition to submitting this metaphoric view of literacies and numeracies, this editorial aims to familiarize Numeracy readers with our search tools and to make a case for consideration and care in regard to keywords. Also, we call attention to some changes in the makeup of the managing editors, the rollout of some new types of papers (“From Book Authors” and “Roots and Seeds”), and a new theme collection on social justice

Review of Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know about the Numbers by Karen Berman and Joe Knight, with John Case

Berman, Karen and Knight, Joe, with John Case. Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know about the Numbers, (Boston MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008). 285 pp. ISBN 978-1-4221-1915-0. From “The art of finance (and why it matters)” (Part One) through “Creating a financially intelligent company” (Part Eight), Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs is an engaging explanation and appreciation of financial statements and financial ratios. Short, easily digested chapters; just-in-time boxes to introduce terminology; easy, direct, in-text calculations from bare-bones, hypothetical financial statements to illustrate concepts; a 44-page appendix of crafted exercises on the income statement, balance sheet, cash-flow statement, and financial ratios from two public companies for deeper understanding; a detailed 19-page index for quick, after-you’ve-read-it navigation – all make for an efficient learning opportunity for readers who want a painless way to know about the numbers used in the world of business. Two quantitative literacy principles emerge as themes. The first is the “art of finance” (social construction): that is, the numbers are not totally objective; to varying extents, they reflect decisions, assumptions, and estimates in the accounting. The second is that ratios provide a window into the story that financial statements are able to tell. Written for entrepreneurs and company owners, the book ends with OBM (open-book management)—a management philosophy based on financial literacy. The vision of this book is businesses in which all employees are financially literate and managers and owners are financially intelligent

Ten Years, Twenty Issues, and Two Hundred Papers of Numeracy: Toward International Reach and Transdisciplinary Utility

This issue completes the first ten years of Numeracy. The purpose of this introductory editorial is to review what has happened to the journal in those ten years. In the twenty issues, Numeracy’s output has been 201 papers counting the one or two editorials per issue. More than 50% of the papers are full, peer-reviewed articles, including 13 papers in two theme collections. The others are peer-reviewed notes and perspectives, editor-reviewed book reviews (15% of the total), and a column by contributing co-editor, Dorothy Wallace. The current issue marks an upswing in the number of notes, and our first discussion/reply. The number of papers per year has been increasing (e.g., 66% more in the last three years than in the first three years). The download rate has increased from about 5,000 in the first two years to 5,000 in about 40 days now. The editorial goes on to document two main outcomes. First, the journal is gaining an international reach: more than half the downloads occur outside the United States now, and the number of contributions from outside the United States has increased from 4 in the first five years to 15 in the second five years. Second, the across-the-curriculum nature of quantitative literacy is coming to the fore. The transdisciplinarity of QL is strikingly evident in this issue, which is discussed in some detail, especially how it conforms to the mission of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The editorial ends with some results from a small ad hoc study of Google Scholar Citation Profiles. The question was, of the profiles that used “numeracy” or “quantitative literacy” as keywords, what other keywords did those profiles use, and what were the source countries? The results show that (1) QL is very much an American term, (2) there is, metaphorically, a vast and interesting numeracy ecosystem out there for Numeracy to engage and serve, and (3) as we become more global, the transdisciplinary relevance of numeracy/QL will emerge even more

Remembering Lynn Steen: A Steen-Numeracy Citation Index (2008-2015)

This editorial memorializes Lynn Arthur Steen (1941-2015) with a bibliographic resource that indexes all of his writings (papers, books, edited volumes, and papers contained therein) that are cited in papers in Numeracy. The citation index contains 67 cited works, each accompanied with a list of linked Numeracy papers that cite them. All told, there are 68 such citing papers (called sources); they cite the 67 cited works a total of 290 times and are listed alphabetically in a source index with links. The paired citation and source indexes provide a vehicle for easy browsing by which those familiar with Lynn Steen’s works can easily be refreshed and reminded, while those who are new to QL can quickly come to an understanding of the importance of the concept and get an appreciation of Lynn Steen’s impact on the field. It is worth emphasizing that all of the source papers and many of the cited works are open access. It is hoped that this resource will facilitate hours of happy and thought-provoking reading and a deeper understanding of quantitative literacy

Educational Assessment Is an Enduring Theme of Numeracy

The Assessment Theme Collection in this issue brings the count of papers on QL assessment to 22 out of the 136 papers (16.2%) in the journal’s first 15 issues. After the first ten issues (our first five years), the counts were 13 and 85 respectively (15.1%). A table in this editorial updates the list of our papers on the subject

Review of <em>The Triumph of Numbers</em> by I. B. Cohen

I. Bernard Cohen, The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005). 209 pp. $24.95 (USA). ISBN 0-393-05769-0.The premier historian of science ends his career telling how the world has become awash in numbers—“how numbers entered the conduct of life and of government, the understanding of nature, and the analysis of societies.” The stories begin with Kepler and end with Florence Nightingale. In between, major players include Galileo, Harvey, Leeuwenhoek, and Halley; Graunt and Petty; Jefferson and Franklin; Lavoisier, Sinclair, Pinel and Louis; Guerry and Quetelet. The book tells of the spread of what Cohen refers to as the “quantifying spirit” from physical science to “political arithmetic” (Sir William Petty), economics, and the beginning of psychiatry, sociology, medical statistics, and public health

Review of Developing Quantitative Literacy Skills in History and the Social Sciences: A Web-Based Common Core Approach by Kathleen W. Craver

Kathleen W. Craver. Developing Quantitative Literacy Skills in History and Social Sciences: A Web-Based Common Core Standards Approach (Lantham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2014). 191 pp. ISBN 978-1-4758-1050-9 (cloth); ISBN …-1051-6 (pbk); ISBN…-1052-3 (electronic). This book could be a breakthrough for teachers in the trenches who are interested in or need to know about quantitative literacy (QL). It is a resource providing 85 topical pieces, averaging 1.5 pages, in which a featured Web site is presented, described, and accompanied by 2-4 critical-thinking questions purposefully drawing on data from the Web site. The featured Web sites range from primary documents (e.g., All about California and the Inducements to Settle There, 1870) to modern databases (e.g., city-data.com). The 85 pieces are organized under three headings (Social Science Sites; U.S. History Sites; World History Sites) following three chapters introducing QL, quantitative sources, and communicating with data. The QL skills in the questions are the usual suspects such as making comparisons, graph reading, table reading, and calculating and thinking about ratios. The author, the Head Librarian at the National Cathedral School (Washington DC), clearly aims the book at high school teachers who wish to comply with the Common Core Standards, which call for making communication with data a part of English Language Arts. The authors of this review believe the book will be of great value for college-level teachers too, whether they be interested in finding context (e.g., history and social science topics) for their QL-math courses, or adding QL-type questions to their in-discipline courses. Moreover, we fervently wish that this book will inspire others to create and compile similar resources in such a way that, in the future, there will be a vast open-access library of such collections of QL questions coupled to data sources – with updated links – available on the Internet