Developments in Data Handling and Statistics for Teachers and PupilsAuthor(s): Neville Davies and Doreen ConnorSource: Mathematics in School, Vol. 32, No. 5 (Nov., 2003), pp. 2-3Published by: The Mathematical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30215616 .

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10 Po Ata ED

Centre for Statistical Education

Developments in Data

Handling and Statistics for

Teachers and Pupils by Neville Davies and Doreen Connor

Introduction

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Centre for Statistical Education started the CensusAtSchool (C@S) project in 2000 in collaboration with the UK National Statistics office. Also it was funded by the Maths Year 2000 initiative and the RSS itself. The project has three main aims:

1. To provide real data for data-handling activities.

2. To increase awareness of what a national census is, and what it is for.

3. To show how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can be used effectively to enhance learning and teaching resources for good practice in data handling.

In this note we describe how the project has progressed into a major international exercise that can help to enhance the data handling skills of pupils and teachers in schools across the world, and we show how it can be used to help create sustainable cross-curricular links and activities. We also present a new project that collects data generated from experiments done at school and enables the data, information and resources to be disseminated back to schools for use in teaching.

UK

Between Autumn 2000 and March 2001, across England, Wales and Northern Ireland thousands of young people between the ages of 7 to 16 took part in the project through their schools, using the Internet site www.censusatschool.ntu.ac.uk. The first (phase 1) C@(S questionnaire comprised a single A4 sheet with about 17 simple questions covering data about pupils, their households and their school life. While some of the questions were identical to those in the UK population census that took place in April 2001, others were designed to appeal to the pupil's own interests and enthusiasms. Over 2000 primary, secondary and special schools registered for the project and over 60,000 school-children took part. Since then other countries have joined the project - the questions we pose can be asked of school-children worldwide with necessary adjustments to reflect local culture and traditions.

Other Countries In May 2001, in Queensland, Australia (www.oesr.qld.gov.au/ censusatschool/home.htm), the Office for Economic and Statistics Research (OESR) carried out the C@S project with great success, and their web site carries similar curriculum resources and access to data as the UK one. The OESR ran it for a second time in March 2003. In October 2001 Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) (www.censusatschool.org.za/)

implemented the project across all nine regions of the country in 22,000 of their 27,000 schools. The returns from SA schools number over 3.5 million and both StatsSA and the Department of Education now have a policy to integrate these data into their forward-looking Curriculum 2005 by the end of 2003. Italy carried out a similar project to the UK one in March 2001 and they used many identical questions, although it was targeted at a narrow age range. Norway ran a version, currently on their population census web site. In 2003, using a Teaching Fellowship grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in conjunction with the University of Auckland and Statistics New Zealand, an Auckland teacher is rolling out the project in New Zealand schools. Later in 2003 Statistics Canada will be starting the project in Canadian schools, as a lead up to their 2006 population census.

The worldwide database, which now comprises over 800,000 anonymizedl responses, can be sampled over the Internet for use in creating learning and teaching materials. It enables teachers across the world to enhance teaching and learning data handling. The involvement of different countries vastly increases the potential for exchange of information between school-aged children and could be a unique way to assess global, social and other changes. It has the added bonus of providing ICT, education and motivational resources for both teachers and children. The UK web site contains freely available worksheets and resources in subjects such as Mathematics, Statistics, Geography, History, Science, ICT and Citizenship.

Phase 3: September 2002 to August 2003 From September 2002 to August 2003, the RSS Centre ran Phase 3 of the project in the UK. The questionnaire, which was completed by pupils online using a web form, comprised 14 questions that included some that involve pupils measuring, counting and estimating. The questionnaire also posed questions based on pupils' out-of-school activities and environmental issues, such as healthy eating and litter. Pupils' opinions were sought and measurements, estimated values and rates were also collected. Another UK-based project, called the Kent Schools' Passport, uses the C@S idea to connect pupils through data collected about them in primary school and subsequently in their secondary school. This project is also ongoing. See, for example, the Kent schools part of the C@S web site.

Phase 4: September 2003 to August 2004

From September 2003 to August 2004 we are running Phase 4 of the project. It is very simple to involve groups of pupils,

1No individual can be identified, the university has signed the Data Protection Act and has a firewall in place.

2 Mathematics in School, November 2003 The MA web site www.m-a.org.uk

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classes or the whole school. Data from each pupil may be returned via our online questionnaires, which have proved fast, reliable and straightforward to use. Once a school has completed and submitted the forms, an e-mail to us will prompt us to send a file of the school's data for use within that school.

We need as many schools as possible to participate in order for us to continue to expand new and free resources for use by all schools. Please pass the message onto other colleagues who may be interested in helping. Do get involved - it's fun to do, provides real data for pupils to use in data-handling activities and is a great way to get them involved in ICT. Involvement needs:

1. A teacher to become familiar with the questions.

2. Pupils to be briefed and prepared for filling in the online questionnaire.

3. Your LEA code and school identifier as a 'password' (available from us if you do not know these).

4. Computer access to complete the online questionnaire.

These activities can be developed into lessons, homework tasks and mini-projects.

A Data Handling Toolkit The RSS Centre has published a manual for pupils and teachers, A Toolkit in Data Handling for Projects, which can help with enhancing the use of real data in data handling, and in particular can be used as a resource for pupils who are doing their GCSE Data Handling projects. The Toolkit shows in clear steps how to collect random samples of real data from the random data selector page

http://worksheet.censusatschool.ntu.ac.uk/random2/.

Full instructions are given for the use of the data in project work, including handy tips, advice and examples on presentation, analysis, drawing conclusions and writing reports. Other unique activities within the Toolkit include facilities to collect data from one or more classes withinyour school using the web site. There are also guidelines on how to make comparisons between classes and also with pupils who took part in the project in other schools in South Africa and Australia.

The Toolkit gives concise instructions on how to produce statistically correct charts, diagrams and tables in Excel and provides advice on calculating summary statistics. Project ideas on presenting and modelling data, single sample and two sample analyses are given along with project suggestions. These include using the data to verify hypotheses from findings of the C@S project in other countries.

There is also a useful section on using common computer- based tools such as word processors, spreadsheets and the Internet to download and handle data. This invaluable resource is available directly from the RSS Centre for Statistical Education or by using Curriculum Online e-credits.

Experiments and Data at School

Using the C@S practice of using the Internet to collect data from, and disseminate to pupils and teachers we are collecting data from experiments carried out by students across the whole age range in primary and secondary schools from September 2003 to August 2004. We are calling the project ExperimentsAtSchool (E@S). See the web site www.experimentsatschool.co.uk.

Many experiments in subjects such as chemistry, physics, biology, environmental science, sports science and general science, and other subjects such as psychology and geography can yield data that:

1. Could be collected over the Internet and stored in a database for use by all schools.

2. Will be of value to teachers and pupils within a participating school.

3. Will be a rich source of material to create learning and teaching resources within and between subjects.

We envisage that getting information from the E@S data, including activities linked to ICT, could also be developed into lessons, homework tasks and projects. For example, the data and information from experiments could be used as material for pupils doing Data Handling projects.

We invite you to participate in the national E@S project this academic year. The ways you could help include:

1. Suggesting experiments that we could add to the E@S web site, and which would generate data of interest.

2. Organising your local family of primary and secondary schools to contribute data using the experiments on the E@S web site.

3. Retrieving data from the web site to use for classroom learning and teaching activities.

4. Helping to write and/or trial classroom resources based on the data collected.

Conclusions

As society gets saturated with data from counts and measurements by, for example, easy access to the Internet, and more and more publicly available data is published in the form of tables and charts, it is increasingly important for as many people as possible to be comfortable with real data. It will be advantageous for them to be able to get trustworthy information from those data. Hence the development and learning of data handling in schools contributes to an important life-skill that will be needed more and more.

We have described what we are developing to help promote statistical numeracy across the curriculum in schools. However, to help us make the projects further improve data handling and statistics we need your help.

Please get your pupils to contribute to our databases on the C@S and E@S web sites and/or send us your ideas for creating learning and teaching resources! @

Keywords: Royal Statistical Society; Toolkits.

Authors Neville Davies and Doreen Connor, The Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG1 4BU. Tel: +44 115 848 4471 Fax: +44 115 848 4771 e-mail: neville.davies@ntu.ac.uk

Mathematics in School, November 2003 The MA web site www.m-a.org.uk 3

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