A LEAP Forward for Quantitative Literacy

The Association of American College and Universities’ Learning Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative has identified quantitative literacy (QL) as one of its Essential Learning Outcomes and classified it amongst five other Intellectual and Practical Skills such as inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, and written and oral communication. This brings to mind a spreadsheet in which these transdisciplinary intellectual and practical skills are rows and academic disciplines are columns. With the view that the learning outcome QL is a row crossing mathematics and other disciplinary columns, this editorial considers how the papers in this and previous issues of Numeracy distribute into the imaginary spreadsheet. The analysis shows that papers in Numeracy have been expanding from the journal’s cell of origin, where QL crosses mathematics, as well as growing in number. The editorial closes by asking about the uniformity of principles of QL from one cell to another in the row, and whether there are levels of QL within the row as a whole. A sidebar notes that downloads are passing the 15,000 mark and the monthly rate now is about 2/3 higher than it was six months ago.