History Does Its Bit

Numeracy is as essential to becoming an active and thoughtful citizen as literacy. Although the concept of numeracy is complex and robust, there are four areas in which teachers can fairly easily begin to incorporate it into social studies curriculum and instruction. The areas include the students' ability to understand raw numeric data in context, to understand percentages in context, to understand the meaning of average, and to interpret and question graphs and charts. The author shares ways to cultivate numeracy in the social studies education classroom related to each of these four basic aspects of numeracy.