65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025

65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025

Efforts to identify and accommodate students’ needs and interests

Conference

65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025

Format: IPS Abstract - WSC 2025

Keywords: cooperation, facts, quality, students, user dialogue

Session: IPS 702 - Bolstering Statistical Literacy

Tuesday 7 October 8 a.m. - 9:10 a.m. (Europe/Amsterdam)

Abstract

Access to quality facts is vital for a democratic and sustainable society, also for young individuals’ opportunities to make informed decisions about relevant topics and issues. Some examples on topics which Norwegian students would need official statistics for according to curricula, user needs amongst teachers, news coverage and debates, are the types of education and jobs young men and women typically choose, the income level after completed education, gender inequality, facts about elections and young voters’ turnout, climate change and emission patterns, immigration, and how to interpret selected main economic indicators.

Moreover, students need a statistical toolbox to interpret our facts about such topics. Thus, we aim at integrating statistical concepts in our learning resources of relevance to students and teachers in upper secondary school and the final year of lower secondary school, our target group. These learning resources are disseminated on a dedicated part of our website. Some examples of what Statistics Norway provides on these school pages (SSB skole) are teaching material/plans and exercises about selected relevant topics, included the uses of measures such as the average, the median and the mode for concrete data, and phenomena and concepts like inflation, GDP, low income, consumption units and what an index is, and more. The production of our learning resources is a joint effort between statisticians, pedagogues and communication advisers, and this cooperation is important to make sure that the quality of the content is good, varied, and comprehensible. Further, the cooperation with teachers and students is important to test our resources.

Also important is how we convey statistics, text, infographics, videos and more to support students and teachers in their efforts to find, understand and use official statistics. User surveys and meetings with teachers have left us with great insight into how we can better present the teaching material on our website. We changed the layout, titles and parts of the texts in the teaching material to make it easier for teachers and students to find and choose the parts of our teaching material and other learning resources which are relevant to them, in cooperation with colleagues who are experts on web design and search engine optimisation.

As we have developed our teaching material and other resources for teachers and students on our school pages, we have also started to collaborate with some other institutions in Norway which provide learning resources or other information to a young audience. This has given us insight into how to better present our material and helps spread the knowledge about official statistics as a reliable source of information.

The presentation will give insight into how we have worked to meet students’ needs with respect to the challenges above, with concrete examples of dissemination and user-feedback and -interaction and cooperation with some other institutions in this area. Also, the presentation will look into some challenges we face in our efforts to identify and accommodate the needs of students in a good way.