Type of purpose/context. People try to manage or respond to a numeracy situation because they want to satisfy a purpose or reach a goal. Four types of purposes and goals are described below. To be sure, these are not mutually exclusive and may involve the same underlying mathematical themes.
The numeracy tasks that occur in everyday situations are often those that one faces in personal and family life, or revolve around hobbies, personal development, or interests. Representative tasks are handling money and budgets, comparison shopping, planning nutrition, personal time management, making decisions involving travel, planning trips, mathematics involved in hobbies like quilting or wood-working, playing games of chance, understanding sports scoring and statistics, reading maps and using measurements in home situations such as cooking or home repairs.
At work, one is confronted with quantitative situations that often are more specialized than those seen in everyday life. In this context, people have to develop skills in managing situations that might be narrower in their application of mathematical themes. Representative tasks are completing purchase orders, totalling receipts, calculating change, managing schedules, using spreadsheets, organizing and packing different shaped goods, completing and interpreting control charts or quality graphs, making and recording measurements, reading blueprints, tracking expenditures, predicting costs and applying formulas.
Adults need to know about processes happening in the world around them, such as trends in crime, wages and employment, pollution, medical or environmental risks. They may have to take part in social or community events, or in political action. This requires that adults can read and interpret quantitative information presented in the media, including statistical messages and graphs. They may have to manage situations like organizing a fund-raiser, planning fiscal aspects of a community program, or interpreting the results of a study about risks of the latest health fad.
Numeracy skills enable a person to participate in further study, whether for academic purposes or as part of vocational training. In either case, it is important to be able to know some of the more formal aspects of mathematics that involve symbols, rules, and formulas and to understand some of the conventions used to apply mathematical rules and principles.
Type of responses. In different types of real-life situations, people may have to respond in one or more of the following ways. (The first virtually always occurs; others will depend on the interaction between situational demands and the goals, skills, dispositions, and prior learning of the person):
Identify or locate some mathematical information present in the task or situation confronting them that is relevant to their purpose or goal.
Act upon or react to the information in the situation. Bishop (1988), for example, proposed that there are six modes of mathematical actions that are common in all cultures: counting, locating, measuring, designing, playing and explaining. Other types of actions or reactions may occur, such as doing some calculations (“in the head” or with a calculator), ordering or sorting, estimating, measuring, or modeling (such as by using a formula).