Teaching statistical literacy by getting students to use real world data: 40 years worth of experience in 40 minutes

The data deluge over the past twenty years has resulted in an explosion in volumes of available data. Access to data is increasingly easy; technology advances have resulted in increasingly sophisticated ways to represent and analyse these data. Citizens are confronted with statistics and numbers in a multitude of ways, so the imperative for improving statistical literacy is strong if we want a well-informed and data-literate population. Social sciences are embracing quantitative methods as demand grows, in the private and public sectors, for evidence-informed policy and a greater sophistication in approaching difficult to measure constructs, such as global sustainability, is emerging. The Sustainable Development Goals set out by the UN1 in September 2015, and the data requirements associated with them, may accelerate all of these trends. This paper will reflect on the authors’ experiences of working with real data in the context of schools, and university social science courses, over the past twenty years, and consider how this could inform discussions in developing statistical education.