We gave adults across the country a numeracy test and here is what we found out…
We thought it would be fun/interesting to take a few questions from a UK numeracy test created by National Numeracy and ask adults across the US to see what the results were.
The questions were rated by National Numeracy as being of different difficulty levels so we selected one question from their entry level, one question from their bronze level, one question from their silver level and two from their advanced level. Giving us a total of 5 questions.
We had 1,580 individuals complete the test with at least 30 adults from each state. It is important to note that we did NOT ask our readers because broadly speaking the level of numeracy is likely to be much higher than the general public. We wanted a map of numeracy levels among “average” Americans.
We took an average score of correct answers for each question then combined these scores to provide a final average and to determine a numeracy score for each state.
Here are the results:
Top 10 States for Numeracy
| Vermont |
| Wisconsin |
| North Dakota |
| Connecticut |
| North Carolina |
| Maine |
| Illinois |
| Massachusetts |
| Colorado |
| New Hampshire |
Worst 10 States for Numeracy
| South Dakota |
| Montana |
| Alabama |
| New Jersey |
| New Mexico |
| Wyoming |
| Texas |
| California |
| Louisiana |
| South Carolina |
So Vermont and South Dakota are the winners and losers respectively!
More like “below average”, “average” and “above average”.
Tle north best results than south, same with civil war.
Why would ND be a 65 and SD a 48 when they have pretty much the same demographics? I think the sampling was not scientifically selected. I have lived in both states and there is basically no difference in the people. This makes me question all the results. You can’t measure numeracy if you can’t even get a representative sampling.
From my own limited experience being a NDSU grad, theres quite a few more engineering jobs and and tech schools in ND versus SD. However, yeah that was my first though when I read the quantity tested is that it was too low of a statistical sampling. I’m curious against what norm they did outlier rejection =P