Abstract:

We attend to an abundance of statistical information in the media and on the Internet, promoted by the development of technology and by the increasing use of statistics in all disciplines of our daily life. This has led to the need to define what has been described in the literature as statistical sense, or set of abilities needed by citizens to understand public messages and be involved in sound decision making under conditions of uncertainty. The statistical sense includes three different components. First of all, statistical literacy, which includes knowledge needed to critically interpret statistical information, for example, knowledge of tables and graphs, averaging, correlation of variation. Secondly, statistical reasoning, that is, the ability and processes needed to solve statistical problems, e.g. the ability to perceive and explain variation, to work with statistical models or to interpret statistics in the data context. The third component of the statistical sense is related with attitudes, such as the valuing the use of statistics in everyday life, interest in learning more statistics and the self-appreciation of the own capacity to learn statistics.

In this paper, we argue that statistical sense is particularly needed in the COVID era, when we receive continuous information about the evolution of the pandemic through a wide variety of statistical data, graphs and tables. Politicians, the press and other media and health organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), inform citizens every day about the state of the different indicators of the disease. For example, we can find diagrams showing the total deaths, or cases of infection, or these variables accumulated over a certain period of time... all grouped by country, region or other parameters. Moreover, some of this information is provided with graphics that are unusual and require certain skills to understand them, for example, multivariate or dynamic graphics, such as the COVID's current situation dashboard. Using this information, important political decisions are taken, such as confinement, commercial closure, mobility restrictions, which affect our way of life and our economy, and are made depending on the evolution of these indicators. Consequently, citizens need to confront the arguments based on this statistical information in order to understand decisions that may change every few days. In particular, students must have adequate statistical and graphical training at any stage of their education so, in the future, they can become critical and reflective citizens in the face of this kind of information.

In this presentation, we examine some examples of different ways in which this graphic information is distributed in different media and analyse the knowledge needed by students to understand and make decisions based on them. We also argue the need to complement the teaching of statistics education with the study of a more complete range of graphs than those included in the curriculum. Finally, we propose that these graphs provided by the government, media and international organizations may be used by teachers as didactic resources, within distance learning actions, to increase the statistical sense in their students.

Keywords:

Graphs, statistics, statistical sense, COVID.