QR Resources Wellesley College's Quantitative Reasoning Program has created a number of resources to help individuals improve their QR skills. The Program has also found a number of resources created by others.

Recommended Readings on Quantitative Reasoning

1) Web Resources

Today there are a number of web resources that can help individuals with their quantitative reasoning skills. In our search of the Internet, we have identified what we consider to be the web sites that deal with QR topics in the most direct, user-friendly way. The first site listed is good for those who need practice with basic QR skills. The other sites deal with specific techniques or classic puzzles in probability and statistics. Wellesley College has no affiliation with any of these web sites.

Resources for Basic QR Skills

Algebra Modules and Lessons from "Purplemath: Your Algebra Resource"

URL: http://www.purplemath.com/modules/modules.htm

Especially good lessons on rudimentary skills (expected of students before entering college) and on basic QR skills (reviewed in QR 140). Rudimentary skills reviewed on this site include: the order of operations, fractions and decimals, percentages, exponents and roots, conceptualization of algebra, and introduction to word problems. QR 140 skills reviewed include proportions, scientific notation, and geometry.

Resources to Supplement QR Overlay Courses

Simulations and Demonstrations from the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics

URL: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/stat_sim/index.html

Great applets, especially on sampling distributions, the normal approximation to the binomial distribution, confidence intervals, the chi-squared test.

Demonstration of a "Plinko Board" from Rand

URL: http://www.rand.org/methodology/stat/applets/clt.html

A nice visual display of a Plinko Board in action - demonstrating the normal approximation to the binomial distribution and the Central Limit Theorem

Demonstration of how different bin widths change a histogram

URL: http://www.stat.sc.edu/~west/javahtml/Histogram.html

This applet allows the user to change bin widths on the number of minutes Old Faithful Geyser's eruptions last. The differences in the appearances of the resulting histograms are dramatic.

Applets from "Probability by Surprise"

URL: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~susan/surprise/

These applets include the famous "birthday problem" among many others.

2) Recommended Readings

On the importance of good quantitative skills:

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, by John Allen Paulos. Hill and Wang, 1988.

Mathematics and Democracy: The Case for Quantitative Literacy, by the National Council on Education and the Disciplines, Lynn Arthur Steen, Executive Director. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2001.

For those with weaker math skills, a text to review before taking the QR Assessment:

The Math Workshop: Algebra, by Deborah Hughes-Hallet. W.W. Norton, 1980.

A good text to accompany the basic skills QR course:

Using and Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach (2nd edition), by Jeffrey O. Bennett and William L. Briggs. Addison-Wesley, 2002.

Some basic statistics texts, appropriate for QR overlay statistics courses:

Statistics: A First Course (7th edition), by John E. Freund and Benjamin M. Perles. Prentice Hall, 1999.

Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences (3rd edition), by Alan Agresti and Barbara Finlay. Prentice Hall, 1997.

Probability and Statistical Inference (6th edition), by Robert V. Hogg and Elliot A. Tanis. Prentice Hall, 2000.

Seeing Through Statistics (2nd edition), by Jessica M. Utts. Duxbury Press, 1999.

On the visualization and graphics:

Three books by Edward R. Tufte, all published by Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983.
• Envisioning Information, 1990.
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, 1997.
  

On the use and abuse of statistics:

How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff. W.W. Norton, 1954.

Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians, and Activists, by Joel Best. University of California Press, 2001.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, by John Allen Paulos. Doubleday, 1995.