Dec 5
How Do I Teach Students to Write with Numbers Effectively?
LTC 2022 Winter Break Conference
Facilitator: Lin Winton
Students will often throw a statistic into their paper for “significance”. The source of the statistic is often unknown or dubious, as is the relevance. How can we co-opt this bad habit into something productive? How might this vague notion of “significance” relate to an unconscious valuing of numbers and STEM disciplines above all? This session is for faculty and staff who want to help students write with numbers more effectively, particularly in less-quantitative courses where numbers can support a student’s argument, but are not central to the course. We will discuss problems with execution and the beliefs that underlie them, strengthen your abilities to identify those problems, and cover essential skills that students need for finding and using numbers rhetorically, but are not the domain of any particular discipline (and thus fall through the cracks). The goal is that instructors of all “quantitative comfort” levels leave more confident and equipped to help students write with common numbers in a way that is accurate and nuanced.