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The inability to understand and compute fractions, decimals, and proportions has important real-life implications, and has been linked to poor health outcomes, among other harmful effects.
Report of the Task Group on Learning Processes
Draft 3/6/2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
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12 comments:
Fractosis?
I guess!
That line about poor health outcomes is just stuck in there, at the bottom of the section on fractions.
No explanation given.
Yes, it is hanging out there. I thought of pharmacists and doctors making errors with medications and treatments due to calculation errors. They often have to calculate conversions on the fly.
"It also has been linked to difficulties in adulthood, such as failure to understand medication regimens."
That's why I assumed that. I read that line in the same report.
Although, by this they are referring to consumers of medications not being able to understand their own medication regimens. I assume these are the types of "poor health outcomes" they refer to.
Here's what one pediatrician had to say about this:
"So many take the stance 'I don’t do math,' but they want to become nurses or pharmacists or respiratory therapists. What will become of their patients if they don’t know where to put the decimal point, if they can’t recognize that a measurement is way out of line?"
Janet Gingold's Amazon Blog
I wondered if that's what it was referring to.
I have a collection of math horror stories along those lines, btw (though none are life-threatening).
Basically, it's probably the patient having trouble figuring out how much medicine to take if the units/explanations are not clear. (Although if the pharmacist has problems, that's even worse!)
Literacy studies have also shown that those with low literacy have poorer health for the same reason--inability to understand their medicine instructions and health literature.
My first student (an adult) had cardiomyopathy. That's hard to pronounce and understand if you're highly literate. I really needed my biology degree to understand and explain her disease and some of her options to her in English (the things they gave her were not exactly written in English.) I got her reading at the the 8th grade level before we had to move. That grade level was fine for the rest of her reading needs, but she still had a bit of trouble with her medical literature. I did teach her how to use a dictionary before I left.
"Most health care materials are written at a 10th-grade level or higher. However, most adults read between the eighth and ninth grade level.3 Approximately one half of adults are unable to understand printed health care material, and approximately 90 million adults have fair to poor literacy.3 "
http://www.aafp.org/afp/20050801/463.html
How many of the people that can't do fractions are the same half of adults unable to understand printed health care material?
I'm guessing there's a correlation. If you can't read the instructions in your math book, that has just decreased your likelihood of understanding the material. (That's assuming that you have a math book with good materials and good instructions. The likelihood of that may also be decreasing.)
From the same link in my first comment,
"The majority of patients with literacy problems are unable to follow the prescription directions. "Take 1 tablet X times a day," with the X being a number8; the medicine is taken at inappropriate times or intervals, or in the wrong quantities. Patients are more likely to understand prescription directions, and follow them correctly, when they are written, "Take 1 tablet every X hours.""
Maybe this is where the math part comes in?
THANKS!
I'll get these things pulled up front.
Of course you're right -- and I've fretted about this myself from time to time seeing as how most of us are going to at some point in our lives to be dependent on other people to measure medicine for us.
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