Relevant and Engaging Statistics

This collection from The Royal Statistical Society Centre for Statistical Education (RSSCSE) has been written to help make statistics lessons more relevant and engaging to teachers and students.

Having run the well known CensusAtSchool Project for the last eight years the RSSCSE are well aware of the impact that using real data can have on the teaching and learning of statistics and have much evidence that this is one of the simplest and most effective ways to engage students, particularly by including their own data and comparing themselves to others.

Students are naturally ego-centric and by making use of this, and generating primary data, statistics can be made both real and very relevant. Relevant and purposeful data can also lead to more cohesive results and meaningful and trustworthy conclusions that are interesting for both the teacher and the student.

All of the materials in this booklet are intended to support teachers in teaching data handling and statistics. They are designed to be flexible and adaptable with the data providing the stimulation for interrogation and enquiry.