Warm congratulations to Prof. Dani Ben-Zvi, a leading member of the program of Technologies in Education, the Department of Learning, Instruction and Teacher Education and to Ido Gal, from the Department of Human Resources on receiving an honorable research grant from the European Community on the subject “Promoting civic engagement via exploration of evidence: Challenges for statistics education”
Research Rational and Needs: A vibrant democracy requires informed citizens who can monitor and discuss societal progress towards economic and social goals and human rights. However, this requires the ability to explore, understand, and reason about information of a multivariate nature, as most social problems and trends involve complex data and multiple variables. This project aims to develop new methods for statistics instruction that contribute to young people's ability to understand quantitative evidence and statistics about key social phenomena that permeate civic life. Thus it fills a significant gap found in most curricula across Europe: the lack of attention paid to understanding publicly available rich data relevant to pressing social problems.
OBJECTIVES: The project has three primary goals:
- to advance a new type of instruction in statistics that is more focused on deep understanding and interpretation of data about social issues;
- to develop open source materials that enable teachers and students to engage with real up-to-date social data from public datasets suitable for each country and pan-European comparisons; and
- to introduce teachers and students to dynamic visualization tools that enable them to explore and understand multivariate data with ease.