Teaching Statistics and Statistical Literacy

In real-world environments we are faced with large amounts of information that is found in newspapers, in magazines, on television, on the Internet, and elsewhere, and that is often presented in the form of tables or graphs. Today statistical data are, unfortunately, quite often abused, mainly because of lack of knowledge in statistics, as we cannot read statistical data appropriately and critically evaluate them. Nowadays knowledge of statistics is becoming a functional component of literacy. Learning and teaching of statistics in schools should be thus linked to real life so that students make meaning and become aware of the statistical concepts in the procedure of solving statistical problem situations or of solving statistical problems itself, which certainly contributes to raising the level of statistical literacy. In the booklet, some aspects of statistical literacy are presented and also a brief look at information literacy is addes as both literacies are closely connected. Despite the debate about the teaching of statistics in mathematics classes, statistics is widely a part of mathematical curriculum and mathematics represents the theoretical basis of statistics, but statistics can to a large extent be made sense of in the context of cross-curricular links, particularly through using it in various projects. Mathematical skills can help understand statistics, while for statistical literacy the feeling for numbers is needed, especially the skill of managing them, the feeling for estimation, the awareness of different interpretations, as well as the knowledge of different statistical concepts. An important goal of the approach to teaching statistics is increased engagement of students, releasing their energy for discovering the new and the unknown and the development of the abilities for the evaluation of the achievements which could result in a higher level of statistical literacy.