Developing Quantitative Literacy Skills in History and the Social Sciences: A Web-Based Common Core Standards Approach

History and social sciences educators have been charged with ensuring that our students are quantitatively literate. Being able to integrate research data in the form of graphs, charts, and tables and deconstruct quantitative evidence to address questions and solve problems is no longer the domain of mathematicians. Being quantitatively literate is considered an educational imperative in a data-drenched world that holds so many employment challenges. The internet contains a treasure trove of valid and reliable sources of quantitative data that history and social sciences teachers can easily use to satisfy the quantitative literacy requirements of the National Common Core Standards. This book features 85 interesting and exciting multi-century and multicultural web sites that are accompanied by numerical critical thinking questions and activities. Teachers can pose the questions to their entire class or individually assign them. It also contains lists of best practices and examples for interpreting, visualizing, and displaying quantitative data. History and social sciences educators will find this book an indispensable tool for incorporating numerical literacy skills into their class activities and assignments.

About the Author :
Kathleen W. Craver, Ph.D., is Head Librarian at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. She is the author of five books, including School Library Media Centers in the 21stCentury (1994), Teaching Electronic Literacy (1997), Using Internet Primary Sources to Teach CriticalThinking Skills in History (1999), Creating Cyber Libraries: An Instructional Guide for SchoolLibrary Media Specialists (2002), and Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History (2008).

Review :
Craver uses a Web–based approach to transform the national common core standards requirement for quantitative literacy in the humanities into a powerful instrument for teachers. She provides history and social science educators with resource sites for lesson plans, educational activities, and opportunities to use the search software that accompanies these sites. Many teachers and their students avoid using numbers as evidence in history and the social sciences due to their own math anxiety. Craver addresses the fear of numbers in the first two chapters of this book, and provides basic instructions for how to use, interpret, display, and visualize quantitative sources. The remaining chapters contain a variety of quantitative websites that include relevant topics for high school students such as piracy or natural disasters, plus site-related critical thinking questions. Educators may want to recommend this book to their secondary students as a potential term paper resource book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. It is far more important that high-school graduates understand standard deviations than derivatives. The Common Core requirement that students acquire basic skills in quantitative analysis is a small but important and long overdue step in preparing our graduates for a world of Big Data. This book by itself can reduce pedagogic math anxiety by making it easier for teachers to integrate these quantitative skills into their History and Social Science courses. With the current excitement and energy involving the Common Core State Standards, “reading like a historian,” and historical literacy, Dr. Craver’s work is extremely timely. The 85 web sites that she describes are wonderful resources for social studies teachers. The activities/questions that she provides require higher order thinking; promote high levels of engagement with historical data; incorporate questions that are interesting to young people and relevant to current events; and foster historical thinking skills. The web-based activities that are suggested require students to “use diverse formats of media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words” (Common Core State Standards, 2010, 60), just as the standards suggest. The activities engage students in reading, analyzing, synthesizing, writing, and speaking about evidence in descriptive, narrative, and persuasive ways. By doing so they immerse students in authentic disciplinary literacies. Kudos to Dr. Craver for compiling this list of resources and for creating these activities. Educators looking to integrate technology and quantitative research into the humanities classroom will find this book to be a valuable resource. Dr. Craver has compiled an array of online resources and designed activities and questions that encourage student collaboration, development of critical-thinking skills, and appropriate use of technology. Using statistics in the classroom-- even a humanities classroom-- helps students identify cause-and-effect relationships. Here, Dr. Craver provides educators with accessible resources for statistics and methods for teaching quantitative literacy. A valuable and important resource for history and social science teachers wanting to integrate quantitative evidence in the form of graphs, charts, and tables into class instruction and student assignments. Filled with multicentury and multicultural sources and offering critical thinking questions and activities, it is an indispensable tool for teachers aiming to meet National Common Core Standards regarding the use of quantitative data.