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Keywords

numeracy, social justice, information literacy, data literacy

Abstract

We describe a pedagogical strategy aimed at developing both quantitative and information literacy skills through a social justice lens. This lesson plan is suitable for a variety of high school and introductory college courses. The student learning goals associated with this pedagogical strategy span three intellectual domains: social justice, through a critical exploration of either the purchasing power of minimum wages across states or the earnings gap between men and women employed full time; numeracy, through the computation of ratios between variables with different rates of growth over time; and information literacy, through a series of activities and discussion questions aimed at evaluating sources of data on wages, earnings, and price levels for authority and content. This strategy was developed for a hybrid teaching and learning environment and has two elements: an interactive online module that students complete ahead of class and a hands-on lesson plan guiding face-to-face instruction. The two resources are part of the economics and personal finance education resources produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and are free to access and use through econlowdown.org and www.stlouisfed.org/education/keeping-it-real, respectively. This pedagogical strategy makes use of up-to-date data available through the FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Database) website (https://fred.stlouisfed.org) of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.12.2.5

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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