Introduction

The classic children's book “The Little Engine that Could” provides an interesting framework to use in reflecting on the movements in the past which have led up to the quantitative literacy programs at colleges and universities today. Whether there was a “happy” train to begin with which was trying to haul “toys and food to the other side of the mountain” is an unanswered question, but certainly there were some “well-intentioned” trains which had engines that either stopped “with a jerk” or slowed to a crawl while yearning for the aid of other engines.

In looking at quantitative literacy through the years, this essay seeks to familiarize the reader with some of the books and proceedings related to quantitative literacy (past and present), define some terms regularly used in discussing quantitative literacy, trace the development of the content and pedagogy for quantitative literacy programs as it evolved through the work of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), note connections of the quantitative literacy “movement” with other curricular movements being advocated or occurring in the mathematical community, and link these movements with changes in text material and pedagogical sources.

Early Movements by the MAA

For the past fifty years the natural MAA curricular group to consider mathematics for general education in college has been its Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM—first called just CUP).