My research focuses on the impact on educational landscape of an historically complacent approach to fundamental mathematics education in the U.S. Reinforcing literacy skills in children at an early age, has always appeared to supersede reinforcing numeracy and, as a result, English literacy is viewed as a defining characteristic of true Americanism. Numeracy, on the other hand, was for a long time considered more of a supplementary ability than a foundational one. Considering what the possibilities of Google Ngram are, and the vast corpora of literature available to Google, I want to explore the historical comparison of the mentions of numeracy and literacy in American literature.
Before I started using Ngram, I had to first figure out how it worked. Ngram uses over 8 million books, which contain over half a trillion words (Pechenick et. al, 2015). The books have been scanned by Google and, based on the words you enter into the search bar, Ngram informs you of that n-gram, what percentage of them contain the specific term you entered (Google).
Before I started searching, I had to decide on baseline parameters for my Ngram searches. I decided on the following:
- Since my focus is on American history, I would use the American English 2019 corpus which is defined as ““Books predominantly in the English language that were published in the United States.” (Google)
- I would search without case sensitivity. It makes no difference, for my purposes, if ‘numeracy’ or ‘Numeracy’ is written.
- I would use a smoothing of 3 (which essentially outputs averages over 6-year ranges). Any smoothing smaller than that shows too many fluctuations (I realized from this why they use the term smoothing because the graphs look really rigid with low smoothing numbers), and since I am looking at the data over such an extended period of time, that is a sufficient range.
Now, I recall reading during my research that the terms numerate and numeracy were not widely introduced in America until the 1950s, so I wanted to see how accurately that is reflected in the literature mentions (Cohen, 1982). Based on Google Ngram, this historical note appears to be accurate.
Furthermore, since the term numeracy had not yet been coined early in American history, I found myself looking for analogues of components of literacy, preferably unigrams (so that they are compared against the same corpus), as compared to numeracy and its components to make comparisons. Comparing the terms literacy and numeracy, illuminates my point, but does not provide much useful data as the mentions of literacy significantly outpace those of numeracy.
Considering how infrequently numeracy was mentioned during the first two centuries of the American republic, I decided to focus my searches on the following terms.
Literacy: reading, writing, dyslexia
Numeracy: mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, dyscalculia
Early in my text mining, I realized I had a big problem when it came to the mentions of ‘math’ and the mentions of ‘mathematics’. For all intents in purposes, we know those two words to mean the same thing in America and, as such, they are used interchangeably—with ‘math’ generally being used for brevity. Let’s take a look at the mentions of ‘math’ and ‘mathematics since 1700. Somehow, around 2013, mentions of ‘math’ exceeded those of ‘mathematics’. I was not able to develop any theory for why that is the case other than it is shorter to type.
As I mentioned earlier, the mentions of literacy far outpace the mentions of numeracy so using one of the advanced usage features of Google Ngram, I sought out to compare the ratios. Moreover, I wanted to compare the convergence of the uses of ‘math’ versus ‘mathematics’ in 2013 to ensure the advanced usage feature functioned properly. As such, I used the “/” composition which “Divides the expression on the left by the expression on the right, and is useful for isolating the behavior of an Ngram with respect to another” (Google). I also used the “+” composition, combined with the “/” composition to demonstrate two things: how the word ‘math’ has increased in usage compared to ‘mathematics’ since the 1950s and how the word ‘numeracy’ has increased in usage compared to ‘literacy’ since the 1950s.
Even considering the learning disabilities associated with numeracy and literacy, dyscalculia and dyslexia, respectively, the latter is easily more recognizable in the American lexicon – pedagogical or otherwise. Let’s see what Ngram says about this.
Lastly, I wanted to take a look at which terms are most closetly associated with the word numeracy so I used the “*” function. The “*” function substitutes the most common words that follow a word you enter into a search.
Overall, Google Ngram supports my theories around the emphasis of literacy over numeracy in America. Numeracy was hardly mentioned prior to the 1950s. Furthermore, even before that, in the early years of the American republic, mentions of the components of literacy far exceed those for numeracy.
[TS1]confirm
