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#numeracy

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Miguel Afonso Caetano

"[E]very year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.

Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.

The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.

Particularly striking however is that we see this alongside decreasing performance in the application of numeracy and other forms of problem-solving in most countries.

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US."

ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-4

#Intelligence#Literacy#Numeracy
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy.

“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”

ft.com/content/e2ddd496-4f07-4

Financial Times · Are we becoming a post-literate society?By Sarah O'Connor
#Literacy#Numeracy#ProblemSolving
Public
Shantell Powell

When I was a Classics major, I had a professor with absolutely no concept of how grading worked. Every week, he'd give us a quiz. The first week, there were ten questions, and I got eight right. So my mark was 80%. The next week, there were nine questions. I got all nine correct. My mark was 90%. Another time, there were eleven questions. I got ten right, so my mark was 100%.

I spoke to him many times explaining that his grading was messed up, but he never understood.

Math does not come easily to me, but here I was trying to teach him basic arithmetic. It didn't work. Everyone had to challenge their marks every week. #math #numeracy #grading

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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

I don't even think these are bad lads or crooks, it just seems #SocialMedia #hustle culture has taken over, above basics of running a #SmallBusiness such as #CustomerService, communication and keeping reasonable stock levels (its also possible they genuinely lack the skills to add more detailed content to their sites as no ones taught them ( a lot of lads become disaffected with #education by their teens and struggle with basic #literacy and #numeracy )

Public
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@ColinTheMathmo Re: (in)numeracy and leaders:

Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists

N. J. Enfield, Mar 23, 2022, MIT PRESS 2022

Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities.*

On the New Books Network: newbooksnetwork.com/language-v

Audio: traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN279856 (MP3)

Enfield's key point is that language is useful for social coordination. Numbers ... for quantification.

Also: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

(In numerous variations, more likely Beilby Porteus circa 1759 than Joseph Stalin. See: quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/.)

Referring to your sadly languishing HN submission here: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4

New Books NetworkN. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022) - New Books Network
#Numeracy#Innumeracy#HackerNews
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James Bradbury

With #𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐭 as standard, it allows players to chat whilst playing the games and can help build on important skills like #cooperation, #listening and #negotiation. There are plenty of opportunities to work on #strategy, #numeracy, #literacy and #logic #skills too.

Some of our games have a #𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 play option so it doesn't always have to be a competition, working together is fun too!

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