In our data-driven society, it is essential for students to become statistically literate. A core domain within Statistical Literacy is Statistical Inference, the ability to draw inferences from sample data. Acquiring and applying inferences is difficult for students and, therefore, usually not included in the pre-10th-grade curriculum. However,…

Official communications and media news in Greece about the COVID-19 pandemic very often involve a multitude of numerical concepts and mathematical relationships, which are presented in different forms and in various contexts. This paper reports selected findings of a survey among adults, which had two aims. First, to investigate their subjective…

The proliferation of standardized testing and administrative statistics in compulsory education is embedded in the rise to prominence of quantified accountability as a mechanism of education governance. Numbers work by stripping away the contexts of their production and the granular and ambiguous detail of the phenomena they claim to represent.…

The aim of the current study was to investigate the statistical literacy of seventh grade students regarding the concepts of average and variation on bar and line graphs presented in alternative real-life contexts. To this end, the statistical literacy levels of the seventh grade students were initially determined. Subsequently, definitions,…

This paper examines and builds on an earlier contribution to this journal focusing on private supplementary tutoring -- widely known as shadow education -- in Francophone West and Central Africa. Drawing on wider literature about research methods in this domain, it examines the basis for the numerical estimates presented in the original article…

This study examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), one of the most influential tools of global education reform discourses in the 21st century. The study focuses on the governing role of statistical data in the discourse constructed by the international comparative assessment, referring to the global educational…

The treatment of kurtosis in textbooks is both sparse and contradictory with applications rarely discussed. To address this, an easily understood definition of kurtosis is introduced and important applications are demonstrated. Two different approaches to teaching kurtosis are presented based on a financial application.

Purpose: Over the years, many upstream health policies have sought to reduce smoking across populations. While smoking has been substantially reduced, the effects of these policies on education-smoking gradient remain unclear. The present paper compares the education-smoking gradient among the Generation X and the millennials, who grew up with…

Today, most medical research depends on statistics, and interpreting these is crucial as the world tries to improve health outcomes. Medical students are at the front line in this effort but many have negative attitudes toward statistics. To assess this and offer recommendations, this study evaluates the attitudes of medical students in Riyadh,…

This paper focuses on the effect of merger on university efficiency. In a first stage analysis, efficiency scores of English universities are derived for a 17-year period using the frontier estimation method data envelopment analysis. A second stage analysis explores the effect of merger and other factors on efficiency. We find that mean…

This article describes how statistics are scrutinised as evidence. It focuses on the uses of a labour market statistic during House of Commons select committee evidence sessions. The statistic in question was '55.5% of economically active black men, aged 16-24, are unemployed'. The article describes how this individual piece of evidence was…

In 2013 this journal published the paper 'Integrity in Higher Education Marketing: A typology of misleading data-based claims in the university prospectus.' It argued that UK universities were using data and statistics in a misleading way in their advertising and proposed a nine-part typology to describe such claims. The present paper describes…

The aim of this research was comparing the performance of primary school Chilean children when reading different types of graphs included in the primary school curriculum in this country (pictogram, line graph, pie chart and dot plot). A sample of 745 6th and 7th Grade students were given a questionnaire including four tasks in each of which they…

While some Canadian universities have a long history in the provision of data services, that was not the norm in Canada, especially in small universities and colleges. To maximize the use of data by students and researchers in academia, it was evident that increased education, resources, and tools were required to support those delivering data…

In recent years, research on teaching and learning of statistics emphasized that the interpretation of data is a complex process that involves cognitive and technical aspects. However, it is a human activity that involves also contextual and affective aspects. This view is in line with research on affectivity and cognition. While the affective…