Teaching Statistics - How To Do Better Than Average 

In early June I was fortunate enough to be part of the final CPD event of the year for the Maths Scholarships, included in which was a session by Dr Craig Anderson exploring teaching of Statistics. 

Rather than a debate about which average is being referred to in the title, this session focussed on why Statistics teaching at school often does not generate the same enthusiasm as other areas of Mathematics, and how as educators we might go about addressing this. So why is there sometimes a lack of interest in Statistics? As mentioned by Dr Anderson, in every other area of Mathematics we constantly worry about how we link what we are doing to real life, always aiming to have an answer to the question of ‘Why is this important?’. However, in Statistics this notion is often abandoned; exam questions ask students to read data and build graphs, but students rarely get the opportunity to apply the subject to messy real-world data, where patterns are often murky to see and not nicely presented. 

Therefore, to inspire interest and engagement with Statistics, the key is to apply the subject to real world data in the classroom, the more relevant to students’ daily lives the better. One activity to do this would be exploring air pollution data. Students can gather data online from local areas, it is relevant to them on a personal level, and analysing the data necessitates exploring questions of reliability, and approximating errors we find in the real world. Though there was insufficient time in the workshop, Dr Anderson gave some further ideas in his resources, such as looking at disease spread and demographic data in other countries. Crucially, both these ideas involve exploration of recent real-world data, coming with all the issues that real-world data collection involves. 

I realise in hindsight that it is often to forget the real-world origins of Statistics when teaching topics such as variance and expectation in the classroom. It was wonderful to find about the activities in this lecture, and ideas like these I will certainly adopt in my classroom next year! 

By Maths Scholar 2023/24 

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