Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Defining Engineering Quantitative Literacy

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Employers and educators have expressed increasing concern about the level of American students' quantitative literacy, which is generally understood to include computational skills and abilities to interpret, reason, and communicate quantitative information and data. These abilities are critical for engineering, yet there is a lack of understanding of the unique aspects of quantitative literacy needed as students begin their engineering education. This project aims to define the quantitative literacy expectations of first-year engineering students and create a means for measuring quantitative literacy, which will allow educators to better prepare future engineering students for success. The main goal of this project will be to obtain evidence to develop a student model for future assessment instruments intended to measure first-year engineering students' quantitative literacy. Using the Evidence Centered Designed Framework, the research team will articulate a Student Model for assessing first-year engineering students' quantitative literacy through several studies. The research team will conduct a content analysis of introductory engineering curricula. Next, they will administer a follow-up survey of introductory engineering faculty to address more specifically the depth of learning expected of students. Then, a small sample of diverse first-year students will be interviewed to determine the opportunities they had to develop their quantitative literacy abilities. Finally, the results will define quantitative literacy within the specific context of engineering. This definition can then be used in future projects to develop measures of quantitative literacy and instructional approaches that support engineering students' development of this critical skill.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.