Integrating the use of official statistics into mainstream curricula via data visualisation

Abstract

There has been a great deal of concern in recent times about the capacity of social science students at all levels to cope with the demands of quantitative methods in the curriculum. The Nuffield Foundation funded a project Reasoning from Evidence to produce some data visualisations and associated curriculum materials to support the teaching of social science at Advanced-level (ages 16– 19 in the UK), using data sets relevant to the Sociology curriculum but which have usefulness across other subject areas also. Social sciences deal routinely with contexts in which the population under consideration is not homogenous. The data used is often presented in aggregated form which disguises the characteristics of the subgroups – whether these are by ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, region or some other categorisation. This paper reports on the development of materials using data on health and on the UK public disorder of August 2011. We report on further development of data visualisations using the 2011 UK Census data.