Have you ever thought about Numeracy? How does it differ from Literacy?

    
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The first time that I vividly remember reflecting on the importance of numeracy more recently was when I read an account of how some industry tycoons learned from a research conducted among the American Population whereby most considered ¼ as a bigger number than 1/3. Dismayed by the implications of this to the progress of the nation and the continued success of their business, they decided to invest heavily on ways to improve the numeracy of their future work force. And then I also remembered another piece of information about research carried out with disenfranchised boys that were considered illiterate in school and dropped out in large numbers as a result, but that could, nonetheless, perform serious math to carry out their work at the open market stalls where they worked. And then, upon viewing the “Branching Out” video, I could not stop wondering: what is it with numeracy that has to boil down to everyday tasks so that we can really grasp its meaning?
To me it seems that both numeracy and literacy share the same reliance on development: to develop both we need to have certain neurophysiological processes in place, i.e., functionally working, to be able to engage in their development. But, on the other hand, numeracy seems to oppose the idea given by literacy (meaning reading and writing and related to words solely) in that the first is regarded as something very difficult to be attained but extremely necessary in everyday life, whereas the second is regarded as attainable but nonetheless one does never really know whether the proper decoding and encoding have been truly mastered…would that be a matter of being precise or exact? Then it comes as no surprise that we should indeed regard numeracy as “everybody’s orphan” as Madison (2003) loudly proclaims. After all, how exact in our numeracy ability?
If you have already read the book “The Phantom TollBooth” (Juster, 1961), you will remember that the Kingdom of Numbers lies beyond that of Words. Albeit being a work of fiction, the book is a classic and for good reason: the insights therein could be hardly ever gleaned from most serious fiction or non-fiction work alike. Therefore, if we are to follow the analogy offered by Juster, should we all go through words to get to good arithmetic? Then it makes sense that the misconceptions that give rise to innumerous unsuccess stories in Algebra might be therein born (Paré-Bagloev & Booth, 2018). On another take and drawing on the work of Pica and colleagues (2004) when investigating how a tribe of Amazon Indians whose language does not afford large numeric representation, those researchers came to the very interesting finding that, for approximation, number-sense comes first, but for exactness, then words rule. Isn’t it interesting that a science of exactedness, like Math is, relies on words for delivery?

References
Berch, D. B, & Mazzocco, M. M. M. (2007). Why is math so hard for some children? Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes.
Juster, N. (1961). The Phantom Tollbooth. Random House
Madison, B. L., & Steen, L. A. (Eds.). (2003). Quantitative literacy: Why numeracy matters for schools and colleges.Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.

National Centre of Literacy and Numeracy for Adults (2012). Branching out into Lean Manufacturing [video file]. Disponível em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAuz-O8_CwI    
Paré-Blagoev, J.  & Booth. J.(2018). Improving Teaching Tools in Algebra. In Schwartz, M. S., & Paré-Blagoev, E. J. (Eds.). Research in mind, brain, and education. New York, NY: Routledge
Pica, P., Lemer, C., Izard, V., & Dehaene, S. (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science, 306(5695), 499-503.

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