The millennium development goals, national statistical offices, the international statistical literacy project and statistical literacy in schools

Abstract

Reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the necessary statistical literacy for citizens' understanding of what they entail requires that National Statistical Offices (NSOs) become more involved in the promotion of statistical literacy in cooperation with national statistical societies, international organizations like IASE and ISLP and national education institutions. All these stakeholders share an interest in the promotion of statistical literacy in schools yet for rather different reasons. Sharing the different skills that each possesses could have benefits for the long term goals of each stakeholder, could help improve school curricula, contribute to the debate on what constitutes statistical literacy and what is the best way to help citizens achieve it, and make the path to evidence based decision making easier. In this paper we present examples of what National Statistics Offices can and can not do regarding the promotion of statistical literacy in schools. We illustrate the common and singular aspects of their programs for schools and discuss how they follow the current trends in statistics education while helping the National Statistics Office's goal of promoting their statistics products and creating more users of official statistics. The work of the International Statistical Literacy Project (ISLP) is discussed in the context of drawing together stakeholders and resources.