How STEM Majors' Evaluations of Quantitative Literacy Relate to Their Imagined STEM Career-Futures

Abstract

Framed by future-selves motivational theory, the present study explored intersections of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) students’ evaluations of everyday and disciplinary quantitative literacy (QL) and how students imagined their STEM-related, future career selves. A quantitative design using data setappropriate Spearman’s rho tests of association was used. Results of Spearman’s rho tests of survey responses of one hundred and thirty-four (N = 134) STEM majors showed that students’ evaluations of everyday QL correlated positively with evaluations of disciplinary QL (p < .001) and that evaluations of both everyday and disciplinary QL correlated positively with how strongly they imagined using and writing about numbers in future STEM-related careers (p ≤ .001). This study establishes patterns to understand and direct future research and guide first-year composition and WAC/WID practice with QL components. Required for engagement in various scholarly disciplines and everyday matters, quantitative literacy (QL) has for years represented a critical objective in U.S. higher education (Erickson, 2016; N. D. Grawe & Rutz, 2009; Rutz & Grawe, 2009) and an increasingly explored alternative to Algebra-to-Calculus mathematics tracks at twoand four-year colleges (Gaze, 2018). Referred to elsewhere in relation to numeracy and quantitative reasoning, QL as referred to here comprises three dimensions: 1. An ability to read, write, and understand material that includes quantitative information, such as graphs, tables, mathematical relations, and descriptive statistics; 2. An ability to think coherently and logically in situations involving quantitative information, such as mathematical relations and descriptive statistics; and, 3. The disposition to engage rather than to avoid quantitative information, using one’s mathematical skills and statistical knowledge in a reflective and logical way to make considered decisions. (Vacher, 2014, p. 11; Wilkins, 2000) Since QL is a fundamental and developing movement in U.S. higher education, questions of how to incorporate and deliver QL instruction remain under robust consideration. In the present study, questions of QL are investigated in relation to U.S. college STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) majors, who study in majors where QL is increasingly necessary for participation (Hoffman, Leupen, Dowell, Kephart, & Leips, 2016; Kosko, 2016; Meisels, 2010; Stroumbakis, Moh, & Kokkinos, 2016). How STEM Majors’ Evaluations of Quantitative Literacy Relate... 2 ATD, VOL16(2) In particular, while research has explored how the inclusion of QL objectives in writing assignments makes for engaging writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines experiences (Kinkead, 2018; MéndezCarbajo, 2016), and while other research has considered links between quantitative writing and students’ emerging STEM identities and dispositions (Paxton & Frith, 2015; Wilkins, 2010, 2016), this study seeks to begin to measure such relationships systematically. Specifically, the following research questions guided the present inquiry: 1. What is the association between STEM majors’ attitudes toward QL in everyday contexts and in disciplinary contexts? 2. What is the association between STEM majors’ attitudes toward QL and how they imagine numerical-data use and quantitative writing in their STEM-career futures? According to Carter Robinson (2012), writing skill and QL represent two pressing needs for nearly all college students in a data-rich workforce and society. QL performance has been described as requiring writing moves and skills traditionally emphasized in composition, with Miller (2010) defining QL as comprising domain aspects of composition, mathematics, and “substantive” disciplines such as history and science (See Figure 1 below). Further linking QL and writing, while also nuancing earlier definitions, N. D. Grawe and Rutz (2009) described QL as involving “the habit of mind to consider the power and limitations of quantitative evidence in the evaluation and construction of arguments in personal, professional, and public life” (p. 3, emphasis added). For N. D. Grawe and Rutz, QL informs persuasive communication as communicators contextualize numbers in writing describing real-world issues, and as communicators convey that information through “the rhetorical power of numbers” (p. 3). Writing assignments have also been described as ideal activities for nurturing students’ quantitative literacy in general-education coursework (Lutsky, 2008). In describing statistics and quantitative data contextualized in prose as within the terrain of rhetoric, Wolfe (2010) has argued that “quantitative argument should be explicitly addressed in composition classes and should be part of the core training of new members of our field” (p. 455). Theoretically and practically, QL has long had an ally in composition and in college writing experiences generally. In discussing the impact that WAC programs at various levels of integration leverage at institutions, Condon and Rutz (2012) noted that WAC, when integrated, may impact, inspire, and assist in the delivery of other movements, such as “quantitative literacy across the curriculum” (p. 371). Meanwhile, while the writing across the curriculum (WAC) and in the disciplines (WID) initiatives intersect with QL by having developed in response to higher-education needs (N. D. Grawe & Rutz, 2009; P. H. Grawe & Grawe, 2014; Hillyard, 2012; Rutz & Grawe, 2009) to prepare students for required disciplinary and personal-life engagement (Carter Robinson, 2012), Stroumbakis et al. (2016) have urged WAC/WID to focus efforts on quantitative writing teaching that is not necessarily presented as disciplinary field-specific. The concern for Stroumbakis et al., in their words, is that, among STEM faculty, “reluctance to use writing remains, as does skepticism about its effectiveness” especially when students are non-STEM-majors (p. 153). For these educators, WID or learning-to-write (LTW) approaches on a WAC-approach continuum (McLeod, 1992/2000) do not prompt STEM-educator investment when field-specific quantitative writing does not seem to figure into students’ future coursework or careers. While Stroumbakis et al. were primarily concerned with STEM educators’ motivation to use writing as a way to support content learning and quantitative writing, at issue as well is student investment in their curricular activities as seemingly preparing them for post-college lives. How STEM Majors’ Evaluations of Quantitative Literacy Relate... 3 ATD, VOL16(2) Figure 1. Contributions of Major Scholastic Disciplines to Quantitative Literacy. (Adapted from Miller, 2010, p. 337.) Relevant to the present study, one way of understanding college-student engagement and persistence is by exploring how students evaluate aspects of their current educational experiences, and how these evaluations of current learning conditions and experiences signal how students imagine their futures. In their future-oriented theory of motivation, Markus and Nurius (1986) argued for a view of motivation “not as a generalized disposition or a set of task-specific goals, but as an individualized set of possible selves” (p. 966). For Markus and Nurius, past and current social circumstances enabled and limited what a person visualized or could imagine as possible; in their words, An individual is free to create any variety of possible selves, yet the pool of possible selves derives from the categories made salient by the individual’s particular sociocultural and historical context and from the models, images, and symbols provided by the media and by the individual’s immediate social experiences. (p. 954) In talking about future-dimensional (disciplinary) identity as a way of thinking about belonging and persistence in college, it is useful to draw on conceptions of identity that have been developed in relation to conditions and settings of learning. Referring to Anderson’s (1983/1991) concept of imagined communities and coming from the point of view of a language teacher, and complementing Markus and Nurius’s (1986) and Dörnyei’s (2018) psychological constructs with sociological conceptions, Norton (2001) wrote that “different learners have different imagined communities, and that these imagined communities are best understood in the context of a learner’s unique investment” in a topic area and the How STEM Majors’ Evaluations of Quantitative Literacy Relate... 4 ATD, VOL16(2) conditions under which that topic is taught and learned (p. 165). For Norton (2001), “a learner’s imagined community invited an imagined identity” (p. 166). How students evaluate current educational experiences and how they talk about their futures offer valuable indicators for how invested students are in their immediate disciplinary contexts (i.e., department where they study) and the imagined communities to which they see themselves belonging. Part of the value of drawing on future-oriented conceptions of investment and motivation, then, is that doing so addresses issues of student engagement, persistence, and retention, which for many four-year public U.S. colleges are institutional priorities. Tinto (2015), involved in retention-theory development since the 70s, more recently declared the variable of motivation as directly impacting students’ persistence choices and actions. Meanwhile, researchers in applied linguistics have drawn on Markus and Nurius’s (1986) future-selves theory of motivation to pose theoretically, and to test empirically, that, as Dörnyei (2018) and numerous colleagues have found, “the way in which people imagine themselves in the future plays an important role in energizing their learning behavior in the present” (pp. 2-3). Finding out, then, how students’ future selves relate to those writing activities students are currently doing in college, and which they find meaningful and in which they are invested,