Abstract:

For the third time, in 2017 Portugal was a participant in the third International Posters Competition of the International Statistical Literacy Project, ISLP. The aim of the ISLP competition is supporting, creating, and boosting activities of statistical literacy in every country in the world, materializing through the execution of a project work in statistics and its disclosure by form of a poster. The schools that participated in the first ISLP competition still try to continue, although an effort has been made to involve all the Portuguese schools the fact is that the schools do not involve themselves in this competition. In this paper, we analyze the views of the organizers, the jury members, and of the teachers in the ISLP competitions.

Statistics has a relevant role in science and citizens’ daily life, which is unquestionable. Therefore, and in summary statistical literacy is important not only to understand world around us but also to empower citizenship. As Mitag (2010) refers that “Nowadays, the importance of statistical literacy also as a key qualification for employability” so from 2007 ISLP organizes international competitions. The first competition took place in Portugal in 2007 and had a quiz format similar to the popular contest “Who wants to be a millionaire”. As Sanchez and Campos (2018) report “The next competition of the ISLP was in 2009, a worldwide competition in 3 phases in many countries, but with similar format to the Portuguese one. The finalist teams competed at the ISI meeting in Durban, South Africa, in 2009.” After that, the competitions became poster competitions. The actual International Posters Competition of the ISLP aim to support, create and increase activities of statistical literacy in every country in order to involve more and more students, teachers as society members in statistics in order to get public attention. In the first poster competition 2010/2011, the students from Third Cycle and Secondary School of S. Pedro (Vila Real) won a second place in the older age division and the Secondary School of Portela (Lisbon) won the second prize in the younger age division. In the second competition 2012/2013, the students from Third Cycle and Secondary School of Pinheiro (Penafiel) won an honorable mention in the younger age division.

In summary the aim of all the competitions is to motivate a positive experience of groups of students (in ages divisions) in performing statistical investigations with real data. In doing so we expect an improvement in the statistical thinking and reasoning in students.
In this paper, we analyze the views of the competition organizers, some of the jury members, and some of the teachers in the ISLP competitions through a survey made to them. Each category (students, teachers, and jurors) had a specific survey and despite of few answers the ones we got were analyzed (qualitative content analysis) and the opinions inspired us to continue to invite schools, teachers and students in order to participate in 2018/2019 International Posters Competition of the ISLP.

Keywords:

Statistics, ISLP/IASE, International Competition.