Whether viewed as an ability or a social practice, numeracy centers on what we as humans do with numbers. Given that we are inundated each day with quantitative information in multiple ways and in various arenas of our lives, numeracy is an important construct to study. In this dissertation, I pursue questions related to a tension raised in recent literature: the tension between numeracy as an ability (i.e., something that one has), and numeracy as a social practice (i.e., something that one does). Over the course of three related studies, I ask the following questions: To what extent are numeracy practices captured through processes of measurement or quantification? How do we talk about the impact of numeracy based on measurements of it? Finally, how are numeracy practices present in students' engagement with public issues, and in relation, how might we attend to numeracy practices in the context of general education mathematics at the postsecondary level? I explore the first question more specifically through a validity analysis of a widely known international assessment of numeracy, the Programme for the International of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The key finding from the first study was that while PIAAC numeracy scores may be valid for the use of describing proficiency distributions of specific population subgroups, the construct of interest-real-life numerate behavior-is not what is measured by the instrument. I explore the second question through a critical discourse analysis of a document describing results stemming from the PIAAC. Findings from the second study reveal that authors of the chosen document used micro-linguistic moves to construct a specific relation between numeracy skills and well-being-a relation that is not justified given the authors' data, yet rendered coherent in that it is situated within broader narratives about the influence of skills on well-being. In the third study, I analyze how college students reasoned with public issues in the context of a focus group, finding that students' responses were related to their beliefs and experiences, and that numeracy events-though present-were primarily centered around students' acknowledgements of the importance of numbers, more so than their active articulation in building on that importance through group conversation. I discuss implications from each of these studies in the context of numeracy assessment and numeracy education.
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