EIU graduates produce, analyze, interpret, and evaluate quantitative material by:
In Spring 2023, EIU began beta testing a new quantitative literacy instrument, which is a brief assessment composed of 10-15 questions that address the 6 quantitative learning goals above.
Principles of the Quantitative Literacy Instrument
During task creation, there were three principles applied:
Principle One is important to making the tasks meaningful to Âé¶¹´«Ã½. This was achieved by utilizing publicly available data (e.g., the 2020 U.S. Census) and setting contexts local to EIU.
Principle Two is important because we want to create a fair playing field for our Âé¶¹´«Ã½, where the specific courses taken by Âé¶¹´«Ã½ wouldn’t have undue influence on their scores (e.g., asking an English major to solve differential equations would not meet the purpose of the QRLG). Though content neutrality is both a practical and theoretical impossibility, mathematical content has been minimized by limiting the mathematics required by a student to Pre-Algebra topics.
Principle Three is important because novel problems require novel reasoning. If a student recognizes a “problem type,” they may perform a quantitative procedure correctly, but this doesn’t necessarily require any quantitative reasoning. By presenting tasks that are novel to the student, the student is required to reason through those tasks.
--from the Quantitative Literacy Report AY23
Quantitative Reasoning Reports