I heard them all at a M.Sc. defence where the candidate describe his experience developing a web-based tool on forest floor classification and how he used multiple factor analysis to understand the effectiveness of the tool based on surveys gathered from 120 students in a soil science course. Ninety-four percent of students agreed or strongly agreed that the Forest Floor web-based resource was helpful for learning forest floor concepts.

I, as a sessional lecturer for an introductory course of 120 students, had also administrated a 40-question survey to understand how students in my class perceived the effectiveness of the different strategies I implemented. The result is messy.

This strikes me because there has been an active discussion on the POD listserve on quantitative reasoning and and literacy for faculty developers. We are surrounded with data nowadays and data collection is happening the moment our students visit our course sites, click a button, watch a video, and/or simple do nothing. What numeracy skills do we need to make sense of all these data?