Teaching Statistical Literacy

Abstract

The key to the development of a first course in statistics is deciding what statistics is. Statistics has, since the Publication of R. A. Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers in 1925; been thought of as a set of research tools. Statistics provides a set of tools which arc required by an investigator for the design of a research project and the analysis and interpretation of the data generated by the study. But statistics has become more than a tool of the researcher. Listen to the news this evening, or read a newspaper or a newsmagazine Listen to public officials and advertisers. Statistics has become a language in its own right This language pervades the media making it nearly impossible to understand a newscast without being quite familiar with the language of statistics, What are these words we hear; “estimates”, “significance”, “projections”, “averages”, etc.? We are bombarded by numbers. But what do the numbers mean? This is what statistics is to most: a language which is very often used and too often misused. Statisticians have, for the most part, not taught about the language of statistics. Even students who have completed a traditional course in statistics cannot usually understand this language A first course in statistics should not try to teach statistics as a research tool. There are two main reasons for this. First, the study of statistics, a research tool, requires students to memorise the use of formulae, if not to memorise the formulae themselves. Students become so involved with learning to calculate statistics that