Miroslav Lovric, McMaster University
I will discuss two recent projects that I have been involved with at my university.
A couple of years ago, McMaster University formed a Literacy and Numeracy Committee, with a mandate to look into initiatives that could improve our students’ literacy and quantitative reasoning skills. Related to it, I crated a course, called “Numbers for Life” (Math 2UU3), in which we discuss authentic contexts that require quantitative reasoning (numeracy). I will talk about the course design and its content. Related to it — as part of my SSHRC-funded work — we (collaboration with a colleague from George Brown College) have developed conceptualization of health numeracy and are building a teaching and learning instrument for health care professionals, patients and general public.
My other SSHRC-funded collaborative project (Queens, SFU, Western, McMaster) involves studying affordances of computational thinking (CT) and implementation of CT in school and university curriculum. In particular, I will talk about how we introduced Python programming labs into our first-year course “Mathematics for Life Sciences” (Math 1LS3).