What meaning do future elementary schoolteachers attach to the numbers that appear in a EUROSTAT database?

If we consider it important to prepare young people to become critical citizens, then we must begin by training teachers to cope with the complexity of databases in order to integrate them as resources for their future teaching. In the context of civic statistics, we carried out an activity structured around the basic cycle of learning from data with a group of first-year students on a primary teacher-training program. The activity was based on data extracted from Eurostat. In this paper, we analyze the way the students identified variables, values and their typology in order to show how they interpreted the “numbers” that appear in the tables, graphs and infographics. We conclude that understanding the numerical representations of civic statistics is a complex task that requires the learning of a decoding process.