Have we got plans for you!
With a new school term approaching the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is today launching stats4schools, a website to support the teaching of statistics across the National Curriculum.
Stats4schools provides teachers and pupils with a free on-line resource offering up-to-date statistics linked to lesson plans and worksheets that deal with interesting themes that relate to pupils at Key Stage 3-4.
One such theme is sexual health and more specifically whether Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI). To support or disprove this claim, pupils can download data collected by several organisations about STIs to use in their final analysis. This type of exercise provides learning activity not just in Mathematics and data handling but also in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and English.
Other themes and exercises include trends in how children travel to school, fruit and vegetable consumption, reading habits and the make-up of local populations.
ONS appointed maths teacher Claire Turner on secondment to develop the content and lesson plans for the website.
She says about her work, “My aim was to develop a free resource that uses real data and provides opportunities to integrate internet-based technology into pupils' work and stats4schools does exactly that.
“Working with real data highlights the true nature of statistics and allows pupils to draw useful and meaningful conclusions. ONS has a wealth of data that can be used to provide an interesting context for pupils to investigate their own hypotheses.”
National Statistician Len Cook fully endorses this project, “ ONS is Britain’s number one public survey house – which makes it a treasure trove of data that can be used effectively for educational purposes.
“ The stats4schools website is part of my wider vision to facilitate and encourage statistical education in the UK. Investment in the next generation of statisticians is needed to facilitate continued provision of high quality information and analysis of the society we live in.”
BACKGROUND NOTES
1. The format of the site is designed to be comprehensible to the average A-level pupil. The aim of the project is:
- To produce a useful resource for teachers and pupils
of mainly Key Stage 3 –4 curriculum.
- To provide free resources for schools
- To give more access to ONS data
- To support data handling within the National
Curriculum
- To allow cohesive integration of ICT (information and communication technology) into pupils’ work
2. Lesson plans, worksheets, datasheets and other resources cover subjects such as:
- Fruit and Vegetable
- Household chores
- Jedi Knights
- Population
- Tourism in London
- Travel to School
3. Large datasets – each containing approximately 1000 records of real data, collected by the ONS as part of the Omnibus Survey – are also accessible.
4. Links to other sites – that help teacher and pupils understand statistics.
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