engleski

ENHANCING STATISTICAL LITERACY AS A UNIQUE LANGUAGE FOR A BETTER WORLD

In everyday life, we are surrounded by information from opinion polls and scientific experiments designed to enable better understanding of the world around us. In the same time, the large quantity of available data does not always imply they are meaningful and useful. Conclusions based on these data might be wrong and misleading, too. Statistical literacy (SL) is a basic precondition for an educated citizenship in a technological democracy. Asking critical questions about possible risks reduces manipulation and citizens can develop a better- informed attitude toward their well-being, their health, democracy issues, etc. In order to increase the quality of information based on statistical data and to increase the awareness of importance of statistics not only for scientists or economy, but also for the quality of life for ordinary people, SL gained lots of attention in the recent period. H. G. Walles’ views “statistical thinking…as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write", while Gal (2002) defines SL as the ability to interpret, critically evaluate, and communicate about statistical information. From a broader perspective, Vichi (2016) promotes SL as a lifelong learning activity needed for reaching better data and better lives. Recent papers are focused on statistical culture, analysing unused potential in enterprises (Dumičić, Žmuk, 2016), and treating statistical data as the universal language of the whole Europe (Bore, 2016). Complementary to that, SL improvement may prevent misuse of statistics, manipulation based on inappropriate presentation of statistical data and graphs, as well as trusting the biased data collected with poor background methodology. Following that, SL has been recognised as a very important skill from the point of view of official statistical data producers, data users and educators, Shield (2002), but especially for: citizens - to be better informed and to practice democracy in a more efficient way ; pupils/students - to gain more knowledge in different areas ; educators - to spread knowledge useful for SL more efficiently ; for managers - to improve their information based decision-making ability under risk and uncertainty ; government policy makers - to better understand the trends if economy development indicators needed for creating efficient development measures ; journalists - to better understand the reality and to properly inform the audience ; professional statisticians and for scientists and researchers in different areas. The promotion of SL has also been supported by many international organizations. On the global level, the UN initiative with the largest public impact was the introduction of The World Statistics Day in 2010 (20 October), while in 2016 the same date was established as The European Statistics Day. Within the project Portadata (Valente Rosa, 2016), Statistical Literacy Index (SLI) for measuring statistical literacy level was developed. In line with that and opposite to the previously prevailing attitude “I hate statistics”, social media have introduced an approach called “making statistics sexy” (H. Rosling’s Gapminder, videos, blogs). Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to increase the awareness of SL importance and to promote the most relevant initiatives of increasing its level among all society segments.

statistical literacy, statistical thinking, statistics education, well-being, quality of life

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