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SAGE 800.818.7243 OR 805.499.9774 6 A.M. TO 5 P.M. PT FAX: 805.375.5291 48 Galvanize your students to love statistics using real world issues Experts Lisa Daniels and Nicholas Minot share strategies to combat statistical innumeracy and ensure that statistics will be exciting and meaningful to students. Despite its obvious utility, students often approach statistics courses with trepidation. What do you do–in life and in print–to counteract that? Students need to be shown that statistics can be exciting. We do that in our course by having students design their own survey, collect and analyze the data, and then report their results in the college newspaper. This semester, for example, the students chose to research social media usage and its impact on mental health, attitudes towards and usage of Juuls (electronic cigarettes), and the use of fake identifi cation on campus. You can feel the excitement in the class when the data start coming in. We offer week-by-week instructions to set up this type of project as part of the instructor resources for our book, An Introduction To Statistics And Data Analysis Using Stata ® (see pg. 47). In addition to the project, we also incorporate many real-world examples in the book by drawing on articles in the news related to topics such as the illicit use of prescription stimulants on college campuses, the legalization of marijuana, and the correlation between SAT scores and income among others. Statistical innumeracy is astoundingly widespread. Apart from your personal efforts, what can we do as a culture to address that? We live in a period of unprecedented growth in the availability of data about health and nutrition, environmental hazards, the state of the planet, and social problems. At the same time, our ability to digest this information and make informed decisions is limited by our lack of understanding of statistics. As a result, there is an over-reliance on personal experience, anecdotes, sensational news stories, and the views of uninformed celebrities. Some people call this the "I know a guy" theory of statistics! We believe that the antidote to bad statistics is a public that can better distinguish between good and bad statistics. However, this requires a solid understanding of the concepts and methods behind statistics. What makes online polls unreliable? How can a survey of 1000 people refl ect the views of 100 million people? What is the difference between studies that show correlation and those that demonstrate causation? Better knowledge of these topics would improve the public debate on a range of important issues, including climate change, vaccines, gun safety, teen pregnancy, healthy diets, and genetically modifi ed organisms (GMOs). 9 9

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