As ideas from data science become more prevalent in secondary curricula, it is important to understand secondary teachers' content knowledge and reasoning about complex data structures and modern visualizations. The purpose of this case study is to explore how secondary teachers make sense of mappings between data and visualizations, especially…

Many important voices--including The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the Dana Center's Launch Years initiative, and others--advocate for expanding the traditional course offerings in high school mathematics and statistics to include courses such as the Introduction to Data Science (IDS). To date, the research on the IDS course…

The African Data Initiative started as a crowd-sourced campaign to improve the teaching of statistics in African universities. The analysis of climate data provides one suitable context to illustrate ideas that lead to a radical new form of teaching. The problem within the context comes first, the technicalities are largely reduced -- mathematics…

"The Times They Are a-Changin'" says the old Bob Dylan song. But it is not just the times that are a-changin'. For statistical literacy, the very earth is moving under our feet (apologies to Carole King). The seismic forces are (i) new forms of communication and discourse and (ii) new forms of data, data display and human interaction…

Statistical literacy involves engagement with the data one encounters. New forms of data and new ways to engage with data--notably via interactive data visualisations--are emerging. Some of the skills required to work effectively with these new visualisation tools are described. We argue that interactive data visualisations will have as profound…

The data revolution has given citizens access to enormous large-scale open databases. In order to take into account the full complexity of data, we have to change the way we think in terms of the nature of data and its availability, the ways in which it is displayed and used, and the skills that are required for its interpretation. Substantial…

Participatory sensing is a data collection method in which communities of people collect and share data to investigate large-scale processes. These data have many features often associated with the big data paradigm: they are rich and multivariate, include non-numeric data, and are collected as determined by an algorithm rather than by traditional…

Despite growing calls to develop data science students' ethical awareness and expand human-centered approaches to data science education, introductory courses in the field remain largely technical. A new interdisciplinary data science program aims to merge STEM and humanities perspectives starting at the very beginning of the data science…

Modern environmental science research increasingly requires computational ability to apply statistics to environmental science problems, but graduate students in these scientific fields typically lack these integral skills. Many scientific graduate degree programs expect students to acquire these computational skills in an applied statistics…

We gave participants diagrams of traffic on two roads with information about eight attributes, including the type of each vehicle, its speed, direction and the width of the road. Their task was to record and organize the data to assist city planners in its analysis. Successfully encoding the information required the creation of a case, a physical…

Past definitions of statistical literacy should be updated in order to account for the greatly amplified role that data now play in our lives. Experience working with high-school students in an innovative data science curriculum has shown that teaching statistical literacy, augmented by data literacy, can begin early.

Many studies have reported on the influence of teachers' conceptions of variability on different aspects of their professional knowledge for teaching statistics and their classroom practices. However, research on these kind of conceptions is still scarce, particularly in Latin American countries like Venezuela. In an effort to help fill this gap,…

Statistical literacy, the ability to understand and make use of statistical information including methods, has particular relevance in the age of data science, when complex analyses are undertaken by teams from diverse backgrounds. Not only is it essential to communicate to the consumers of information but also within the team. Writing from the…

Data are abundant, quantitative information about the state of society and the wider world is around us more than ever. Paradoxically, recent trends in the public discourse point towards a post-factual world that seems content to ignore or misrepresent empirical evidence. As statistics educators we are challenged to promote understanding of…

Many teachers of statistics recommend using real-life data during class lessons. However, there has been little systematic study of what effect this teaching method has on student engagement and learning. The present study examined this question in a first-year university statistics course. Students (n = 38) were interviewed and their reflections…