The Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) Assessment, 1: Development and Validation

Abstract

Science is an inherently quantitative endeavor, and general education science courses are taken by a majority of college students. As such, they are a powerful venue for advancing students' skills and attitudes toward mathematics. This article reports on the development and validation of the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) Assessment, a numeracy assessment instrument designed for college-level general education science students. It has been administered to more than four thousand students over eight semesters of refinement. We show that the QuaRCS is able to distinguish varying levels of quantitative literacy and present performance statistics for both individual items and the instrument as a whole. Responses from a survey of forty-eight Astronomy and Mathematics educators show that these two groups share views regarding which quantitative skills are most important in the contexts of science literacy and educated citizenship, and the skills assessed with the QuaRCS are drawn from these rankings. The fully-developed QuaRCS assessment was administered to nearly two thousand students in nineteen general education science courses and one STEM major course in early 2015, and results reveal that the instrument is valid for both populations.

Social Justice, Numeracy, and Teaching Statistics at a Community College

“…Many students arrive at my classroom innumerate. I base this statement on their poor performance on the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) Assessment (Follette et al 2015). Several years ago, two colleagues and I obtained rights to use this assessment.…”

Designing online learning modules to conduct pre- and post-testing at high frequency

“…In future implementations with a larger sample size, an iterative bootstrapping likelihood ratio test can be used to determine the optimum number of components for a given distribution based on fitting indices such as AIC and BIC [15]. Furthermore, in future studies the validity of the data analysis method can be further examined by surveying students about their test taking effort, as is done in [16].…”

Quantitative Literacy and Reasoning of Freshman Students with Different Senior High School Academic Background Pursuing STEM-Related Programs

“…Consequently, with this glaring evidence on the importance of QLR, there arises a need to assess the quality of quantitative skills that the students develop during their postsecondary education (Roohr et al, 2014). Especially for the case of students enrolling STEM degrees in the tertiary level, they are expected to have developed sufficient quantitative skills as science in general is a quantitative endeavour (Follette et al, 2015). Unfortunately, literature suggesting the conduct of such assessment appears to be limited especially for the case of Southeast Asian countries.…”