Quantitative Reasoning Foundation
To fulfill the Quantitative Reasoning Foundation, students will take one three or four-credit course chosen from core-designated courses that meet one of the course options listed below.
Why Quantitative Reasoning?
Quantitative reasoning (QR) skills are essential in the modern world. Every professional career demands some ability to understand presentations of quantitative data, analyze them and draw reasonable conclusions, and utilize such data in making arguments. A comprehensive liberal arts education must improve students’ appreciation of the value of quantitative approaches to understanding and modes of thought. This requirement offers students the flexibility of acquiring QR in a variety of ways most suitable to their academic objectives.
For Faculty Advisors
The information below is intended to help faculty members learn more about the Quantitative Reasoning Foundation.
Requirement Objectives
The following is a list of objectives that you may find helpful when you’re preparing to submit a course to the CCC for approval.
Course option #1 will:
- Teach students the basic elements of statistics including frequency distributions, measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, the normal distribution, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and significance.
- Examine how quantitative reasoning and evidence are used in constructing substantive arguments.
- Evaluate quantitative claims according to conceptual, statistical, and mathematical criteria.
- Demonstrate ways of responsibly communicating quantitative information in graphics and in writing.
Course option #2 will:
- Provide an introduction to the basic theory of differential or integral calculus.
- Demonstrate how calculus can be used to formulate and solve problems in the natural and social sciences.
- Evaluate quantitative claims using calculus.
- Demonstrate ways of responsibly communicating quantitative information graphically and in writing.
Course Option #3 will:
- Provide an introduction to the language and notations of set theory, propositional logic, and methods of proof.
- Apply these methods of proof in areas such as number theory and algebra.
- Provide an introduction to combinatorics and probability.
- Demonstrate ways of correctly constructing a mathematical argument.
Course Option #4 will:
- Provide an introduction to the mathematics underlying some commonly encountered objects including, for example: debt amortization, the future value of an investment, the present value of an annuity, problems involving elementary probability, the expected value of a random variable, the optimization problems, the utility of matrix operations in solving systems of linear equations, the use of Markov chains in analyzing discrete random processes, elementary graph theory, the symmetry of natural world and symmetry in art.
- Provide students with examples of practical problems which can be modeled, analyzed and solved using one or more of the mathematical techniques developed within the course.
- Require students to become adept at both modeling and solving practical problems using the mathematical ideas developed within the course.
- Concentrate on developing students’ abilities to communicate mathematical ideas effectively in both written and presentation format.
