Examining the effectiveness of the numeracy course ‘Numbers for Life’ at McMaster University

This paper reports on our study of the effectiveness of the course instruction in the numeracy course ‘Numbers for Life’, offered at McMaster University, Canada, and taught by one of the co-authors. In this course students explore the ways to reason with numbers in a variety of contexts important not only for their individual lives and their community, but broader – it helps them understand the world they live in, and the challenges they will face. To answer important questions about students’ learning and their development of quantitative reasoning skills, we designed a two-year research project, for which we secured government funding. We combined quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods to assess the gains in student learning and skills development using a number of instruments, including pre-test and post-test surveys, class activities, course assessments and teaching evaluations. Our research suggests that the “Numbers for Life” course instruction improves most students’ numeracy knowledge and skills. We detected improvements in students’ ability to understand numbers, ability to engage with logical constructions and reasoning, and ability to engage with multiple-step problems which require quantitative reasoning. The largest learning gains were detected among students who had inadequate background, as determined by their pre-test performance. We were not able to detect pre- to post-test improvements in communication (explaining what a numeric answer represents, providing a logical argument, creating a narrative about a situation involving numbers, and so on). We believe that part of the reason for this lies in the fact that students were probably not as serious, nor as patient in their approach to completing their post-test (at the end of the semester) as they were in completing a pre-test (at the start of the semester).