Numeracy

Who Is Innumerate?

Recent historical increases in the quantitative skills needed to function well in many jobs (both traditionally white- and blue color) and to understand many now routine day-to-day tasks have resulted in a moving target in terms of defining numeracy. Quantitative competencies that were sufficient for most people several generations ago are no longer sufficient. At this time, the best estimate for countries like the United States and the United Kingdom is that 20–25% of adults are functionally innumerate; they do not have the quantitative skills needed to consistently make a living wage or make effective decisions using quantitative information. On the basis of international differences in mathematics achievement, it is likely that there are fewer functionally innumerate adults in some other countries (e.g., China, Finland) and more innumerate adults in still other countries (e.g., Peru). There may also be cross-generational changes in numeracy. Generally, 65-year-olds perform more poorly on cognitive tasks than do younger adults, but basic arithmetic is an exception, at least in the United States. At this time, grandparents typically outperform their adult children, and adult children in turn outperform their own children in arithmetic, reflecting cross-generational changes in the teaching of basic mathematics during formal schooling.

Development of Numeracy

Children’s quantitative competencies when they enter formal schooling predict their relative mathematics achievement throughout schooling and thus their numeracy in adulthood. This does not mean that the poor quantitative abilities of innumerate adults cannot be improved, but it does mean that the prevention of innumeracy requires the identification of the school-entry quantitative knowledge that sets the course for students’ mathematical learning throughout schooling as well as the identification of the early foundations of this school-entry quantitative knowledge.

Recent studies suggest that the children who start school with a poor understanding of Arabic [Page 1521]numerals, the magnitudes they represent, and the relations among them (e.g., 7 = [6 + 1] = [5 + 2] = [4 + 3]) score poorly on numeracy tests as adolescents. In one such study, 6-year-olds who started school in the bottom 15–20% in this knowledge were 4 times more likely to score as innumerate in adolescence on tests that later predict employability and wages, independent of race, parental background, reading skills, intelligence, and other factors. By 8 years of age, these at-risk children learned basic arithmetic as quickly as other children, but they never narrowed the school-entry gap. The early identification and remediation of the skills deficits of these at-risk children before they begin formal schooling thus has the potential to yield substantial individual and societal benefits.

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