“I really like the Worked Examples. They have sufficient explanations for the students, but do leave some room for students to think about what should happen next. The Try It Yourself problems allow the students to actively be a part of their learning and see if they can understand what is happening in the problems.”
—Kathryn Kozak, Coconino County Community College
“The exercises are well constructed, leading from simple reinforcement of the techniques introduced, to extension of the concepts, to research projects asking the students to investigate certain topics in more depth.”
—David S. Tucker, Midwestern State University
“The in-chapter summaries and Quick Review sections keep students up to date with what they should have learned so far. The Key Concepts boxes give students a quick glimpse of the important topic concepts and definitions. Try It Yourself exercises gives the students immediate practice, and the take-away in the margin notes lets them know what they will be learning as they go through the section. These are all good ideas that will help the learning process of the students.”
—Salvatore Sciandra, Niagara County Community College
“I am very glad that there is an entire section on credit cards, which is very important for college students. Some textbooks devote only a few paragraphs or examples to credit cards, so I am glad to see that the book has an entire section on credit card debt.”
—Kenny Palmer, Tennessee Technological University
“The philosophy of Quantitative Literacy seems to be using mathematics in our daily lives and understanding the concepts behind them. It spends a great deal of time on where math is seen every day and how it will affect the life around a person. I feel that it spends time on social issues also. I think many liberal arts math books do this, but Quantitative Literacy seems to really spend the time showing the connection to daily life with the news articles. The homework questions want students to not only be able to do the computations, but to also interpret the results. This is important, because someone else can do the computations for a person, but interpreting needs to be done by the person.”
—Kathryn Kozak, Coconino County Community College
“I think the Algebraic Spotlights are excellent and would be very helpful to students, many of whom are weak in algebra.”
—Martha Rooney, University of Colorado, Boulder
“By not showing every way to solve each problem, Quantitative Literacy encourages personal problem solving. I think the biggest issue for students is when they have an exercise in the book and can’t find an example just like it, they shut down. But the examples should lead them and the examples in Quantitative Literacy accomplish that.”
--M. Shawn Peterson, Texas State University
“The applications were very interesting to read. I really think one of this book’s advantages is the ability to relate most topics to something in the real world. Right from the beginning I was intrigued with the probability of an asteroid hitting earth. I liked the news article where the probability of rain translated into isolated showers, scattered showers, to numerous showers.”
--Dori Stanfield, Davidson County Community College
“Worked Examples are fantastic and they are plenty in number. Students can truly appreciate how math is used in modern world by looking at these examples.”
--Krishnasamy Arasu, Wright State University
“I truly appreciated much of what the authors did in this book. The diversity of topics throughout the chapters was impressive. The book flowed well through the ideas, developing each thoroughly while providing many ‘real-life’ examples and applications motivating the material. Our current text does not provide enough explanations; it is far too terse.”
--Lauren Fern, University of Montana
“The author does an excellent job of varying the types of exercises and applying the topics to real-world problems. I am quite impressed with the variety of exercises.”
—Tracy Romesser, Erie Community College
“The exercises are very good and appropriate for the material presented. The multiple-part questions are good, as they make students apply what they learned in several different ways, and teachers can cover many topics without assigning an overload of homework.”
—Laramie S. Paxton, Coconino Community College
“The approach of Quantitative Literacy appears to be one of ‘talking to the reader.’ Information is presented in an accurate but readable format. Examples and exercises are then used to reinforce the information presented in the discussion. This is an extremely positive feature. The news articles are used to show that the information is not merely some ‘made-up’ scenario by a mathematician. In fact, there are more such news articles than most similar texts.”
—Gerald Burton, Virginia State University