Abstract
Our previous discussion (Marcinek, Dias, & Piatek-Jimenez, 2010) focused on the challenges of designing a college competency course that should provide a diverse population of young adults, college students, with opportunities to improve their numeracy and quantitative reasoning skills. One of the challenges involved negotiations of the meaning of “real-life” and “everyday mathematics” among committee members with various mathematical backgrounds. This contribution focuses on related questions of relevance and authenticity of problems: What (quantitative) contexts are (or potentially will be) perceived as authentic and relevant in the lives of our students? What kind of evidence may help us answer the question? We discuss these questions in the context of our first pilot course that was offered in Spring of 2010 with an emphasis on content analysis of students journals they kept during the semester as one of the course assignments.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of Adults Learning Mathematics - A Research Forum |
| Publisher | Adults Learning Mathematics – A Research Forum |
| Pages | 269-278 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-0-9551218-1-4 |
| State | Published - Sep 2012 |