TEACHING STATISTICAL LITERACY BY GETTING STUDENTS TO USE REAL WORLD DATA: 40 YEARS WORTH OF EXPERIENCE IN 40 MINUTES Jackie Carter* and James Nicholson** *University of Manchester, UK JackieCarter@manchester.ac.uk **SMART Centre, University of Durham, UK j.r.nicholson@durham.ac.uk The data deluge over the past twenty years has resulted in an explosion in volumes of available data. Access to data is increasingly easy; technology advances have resulted in increasingly sophisticated ways to represent and analyse these data. Citizens are confronted with statistics and numbers in a multitude of ways, so the imperative for improving statistical literacy is strong if we want a well-informed and data-literate population. Social sciences are embracing quantitative methods as demand grows, in the private and public sectors, for evidence-informed policy and a greater sophistication in approaching difficult to measure constructs, such as global sustainability, is emerging. The Sustainable Development Goals set out by the UN 1 in September 2015, and the data requirements associated with them, may accelerate all of these trends. This paper will reflect on the authors’ experiences of working with real data in the context of schools, and university social science courses, over the past twenty years, and consider how this could inform discussions in developing statistical education. INTRODUCTION Teachers and lecturers are extremely busy – if we want to encourage a greater emphasis on embedding real data in substantive course content in the social sciences then we need to both convince the teachers and lecturers of the value of doing so, and make it much easier for them to assimilate it naturally into their courses. We also know that students who thought they had left maths behind at secondary school are loathe to pick up quantitative methods at university. The challenge to teachers is therefore to motivate learners, and if they are not maths or statistics teachers to minimize the effort required to incorporate numbers into their lessons. To some extent the problem is in which part of the curriculum statistics is taught. Should it be in the maths or stats class, or embedded throughout other subjects? There are significant efforts underway, at least in the UK, to develop a ‘statistically-literate population’ for those who dropped maths at the age of 16, especially in the social sciences where quantitative skills are regarded to be in short supply (see Core Maths in England –see http://www.core-maths.org/) Very often in the social sciences theory and aspects of the data landscape are introduced together – with data visualizations offering the opportunity for students to grasp the big picture – the “stories in the data” of the observations, before embarking on learning disciplinary theories which seek to explain the observed behaviour, or indeed working with multivariate (MV) analytical techniques. We aim here to draw on the authors’ collective experience of teaching and supporting statistics and quantitative methods teaching at school and university level, to provide examples of how this learning can be applied in the workplace, and to contribute to the debate on what it means to develop statistically literate citizens. Attention will be given to the learning of statistical techniques and concepts, together with the application of that learning through practice especially in social science courses. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION This paper recounts two individual journeys, from two different perspectives. Nonetheless, the experiences covered here converge in ways that inform the development of statistical literacy education. Both authors started their professional careers teaching mathematics in secondary schools (for ages 11 – 18). The first author (JC) has spent the last 20 years working at university level though the motivation for working with real data and applied statistics originated in experiences gained from teaching at school level. The second author (JN) worked in schools for a quarter century and for the past 12 years has been developing resources, especially data visualisations, to 1 http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ IASE 2016 Roundtable Paper – Refereed Jackie Carter & James Nicholson 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