CIVIC STATISTICS AND THE PREPARATION OF FUTURE SECONDARY SCHOOL MATHEMATICS TEACHERS Achim Schiller 1 and Joachim Engel 1 1 Ludwigsburg University of Education, Germany schiller01@ph-ludwigsburg.de, engel@ph-ludwigsburg.de Statistics education in Germany at secondary and tertiary level is lagging behind the demands for engaged citizenship in the information age. We detected students’ deficiencies in statistical literacy especially in regard to understanding multivariate phenomena which are common in data about society. Thus we started to change the way statistics is taught by introducing elements of what we call civic statistics into the curriculum for students preparing to be secondary school mathematics teachers. Focusing on critical questioning and critical thinking one element is dealing with the understanding and interpretation of short data-based statements. INTRODUCTION The availability of data has tremendously increased. The data deluge is changing the demands for engaged and informed citizenship in times of free access to data about social topics like income inequality, access to health services or migration through the internet, national and international statistics offices or NGOs. Understanding this kind of data requires different knowledge and dispositions than the current statistics education represents (Ridgway et al., 2013). There are new dimensions for civic participation in public decision processes - to become a responsible citizen capable of critical and evidence based judgment about social topics as basis for committed involvement, the ability to understand and to interpret these data is indispensable (Engel, 2014). To understand these data citizens need specific statistical knowledge that is not part of the current curriculum, in addition to a cognitive and dispositional base that includes (but is not limited to) context knowledge and critical thinking skills (Gal, 2002). Current statistics curricula in schools and colleges as well as in textbooks focus too much on formal statistical procedures as well as on uni- or bivariate small datasets, rather than on the knowledge and attitudes required for understanding patterns and changes in social phenomena. Most social phenomena are multivariate, presented by complex graphs or tables, have a laborious operationalization of variables, confounding variables and have correlations as well as multiple underlying causal factors. Besides elements of descriptive statistics and basic concepts of exploratory data analysis needed for understanding the actual information, critical questioning as a knowledge element of statistical literacy (Gal, 2002) and “critical thinking as general thinking skills and strategies” (Aizikovitsh-Udi & Kuntze, 2014) are of equal importance. TEACHING MODULES ABOUT CIVIC STATISTICS In view of the needs for engaged citizenship we propose a new orientation in statistic education. Statistically literate citizen need the capacity to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes to understand and communicate about relevant multivariate data. The project Pro Civic Stat, funded by the European Commission as strategic partnership between six universities, aims to develop new teaching modules for statistics instruction that contribute to young people’s ability to be aware of and understand quantitative evidence and statistics about key social phenomena that permeate society, their social and private life. Selective information may develop into a stumbling block on the way to an individual’s independent and informed interpretation. Therefore, it is important to know which information is necessary for a suitable valuation. One of the goals of Pro Civic Stat is to design a complete course Civic Statistics comprising a set of self-sufficient modules which may also be integrated as smaller units into other (statistics) courses. Informed citizen as data-consumer (cf. Gal 2002, Rumsey 2002) need to be able to understand, verify, interpret, and critically evaluate data-related arguments and various IASE 2016 Roundtable Paper – Refereed Achim Schiller & Joachim Engel In: J. Engel (Ed.), Promoting understanding of statistics about society. Proceedings of the Roundtable Conference of the International Association of Statistics Education (IASE), July 2016, Berlin, Germany. ©2016 ISI/IASE iase-web.org/Conference_Proceedings.php