Sid the Science Kid: Charts Rule!

Did you need a catchy little jingle reminding you that charts "give you information you can see with your eyes -- charts let you visualize"? Here you go!

Let's hear it for addressing statistical literacy when kids are young!

(Hat tip: Tasty Data Goodies)

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Reporting Statistics Blog

I've added a new blog to the blogroll on the right-hand side of this page: Reporting Statistics. It calls itself "Just a blog from a writer with some statistics to share" and "The Blog with the Search Engine for Statistics."

I'd like to encourage you to visit the blog, and not just because it says nice things about this site. It already has information of interest with better writing than this blog, and the author's just getting started.

(I had been toying with allowing advertisements on this blog to offset some of the upkeep costs. Reporting Statistics convinced me to delay that decision. Thank you for that inadvertent lesson at just the right time. I'm going to see if I can go another year ad-free on this site.)

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Data Access Tools: Central Ohio

Community Research Partners in Columbus, Ohio, is an organization I like a lot -- they do really good work, and I had the opportunity to sit on a board with one of their former associates and was impressed with the caliber of work he did. (Hi, Mike!)

I like what they've done with their website to integrate their indicators reports, research efforts, and interactive data/mapping tools. Check out http://communityresearchpartners.org/datatools/ to see what I mean.

They do one other thing I really like: They train people on how to use the data in making better decisions.

As an extra bonus, they provide a pretty good summary of how to use community indicators on their website:

How Indicators can be Used

The indicator data can be used in a variety of ways—for policy and program design, resource allocation, grant applications, program evaluation, advocacy, and research. The following describe the ways that indicators help us understand our community:

• Indicators provide information about large systems.
  The Community Indicators Handbook (Authors: Tyler Norris Associates, Redefining Progress and Sustainable Seattle) includes this definition of indicators:“Indicators are small bits of information that reflect the status of larger systems…When we can’t see the condition of something in its entirety– whether it’s… a person, an educational system or a whole community–we need indicators to make these conditions visible. Indicators can’t tell us everything, but they can tell us enough to make good decisions possible.”
  
• Indicators help us see relationships among aspects of community life.
  Redefining Progress, a nonprofit research organization, provides the following perspective on indicators:“…indicators can bring many different sectors of the community together, foster new alliances and relationships, provide all citizens with a better compass for understanding community problems and assets…Unique partnerships for improving communities can be formed as community members begin to appreciate the linkages among seemingly unrelated aspects of community life.”
  
• Indicators link the past to the future.
  The International Institute for Sustainable Development describes the use of indicator data in this way:“Societies measure what they care about. Measurement…provides an empirical and numerical basis for evaluating performance, for calculating the impact of our activities on…society and for connecting past and present activities to attain future goals.”The Community Indicators Database is being developed with all of these viewpoints in mind. CRP hopes that the database will help the community to better understand its systems, gain new insights into the interrelatedness of community trends, and most importantly, develop consensus on data-driven goals for the future.

So check out the site and let me know what you think.

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Radical Math: Social Justice and Statistical Literacy

A recent conference explored the potential relationship between math instruction and social justice. For those of us using community indicators to create community change, some of the same lessons apply -- and the good news is that these lessons are now available in a standardized curriculum.

There's a resource called Radical Math that provides this framework to connect learning math with social justice. From the guide (PDF), here's two reasons why integrating these two concepts makes sense:

• Good math doesn’t mean good politics
  There are some textbooks and popular curricula that are useful for teaching young people mathematics. Many of these texts even use real-world contexts for instruction. However, very few of them are relevant to our young people, and they don’t have students investigate issues of social justice. Talking about a jar of Jelly Beans can be a fun way to learn about probability. But studying probability in the context of a unit on how the Lottery increases the economic divide between rich and poor will allow the class to cover the same mathematical content while simultaneously investigating an important issue of economic inequality.
  
• Good politics doesn’t mean good math
  Many people often make the mistake of thinking that just because we are talking about important and relevant issues, that there is good teaching and learning going on in our classrooms. Unless the math content itself is strong, even the most provocative conversations and lessons are actually doing students a disservice. It is an act of social in-justice to deny young people the opportunity to master the math that they are in your class to learn.

There's a fascinating article called Making Numbers Count at Tolerance.org that discusses this approach to learning math. I liked this quote from Janet Wayne, an 11th-grade math teacher in Los Angeles:

"These kids got involved socially and politically in their communities because they knew the numbers," Wayne says. "And I have to tell you, that's why I love math."

The approach is not without its critics, of course. I'll leave the arguments about politics in the classroom to others. But finding a way to increase statistical literacy by using real-world social justice data can't be all bad.

The resources page at Radical Math links to a series of background information (and a number of indicators data sources).

If you've been working with local math classes with your community indicators projects to provide the data for them to learn about graphs and data analysis, please share. If you aren't, here's an interesting idea to explore.

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Training on Using Community Data

I enjoy hearing about how other communities help people use their indicators reports. If you do community training on how to use data, please tell me about it and we'll see if we can start a conversation on tips, techniques, and traps in helping improve statistical literacy.

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Myth-Perceptions and Public Policy Implications

With apologies to Robert Asprin, the headline from the Washington Post (Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach) raised some interesting questions about how we use data in decision making and create energy around community improvement.

The research behind the article suggests that correcting misinformation reinforces the misinformation. If you directly confront falsehood by rebutting it, people remember the falsehood as true -- and they'll claim you were the source! From the article:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

For those of us involved in community indicators work, this is troubling news -- perhaps as discouraging as learning that facts and figures make us care less.

Denials don't work, according to the article -- they only reinforce the myth. Silence doesn't work either:

So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the answer to that question also seems to be no.

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

So what can we do about it? One approach may be to create a new story, where the data are integral to the story itself -- like the Three Little Pigs. The answer may not be to combat the false information directly, but to crowd it out with a new story -- which, through repetition, becomes lodged as fact.

But be careful -- we used a number to draw attention to the problem of adult functional illiteracy in our community, and that number took on a life of its own -- soon that particular percentage point was used to point out how horrible illiteracy was in our community, and without reinforcement that number was used for the next seven years as a rallying point to bring the issue to the front. (We grew to hate that number, because its significance was lost as it outgrew its context. And no, I won't repeat the number!) Only by telling a different story without referencing the original number (and quietly talking to those who were repeating it the loudest) did the conversation change.

What other successful strategies have you used to displace myth with real data in your community?

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Statistical Literacy

I thought I'd pass along a couple of interesting sites that deal with the issue of helping people understand numbers and data.

The first site is Innumeracy.com, which highlights the extent to which people either don't understand numbers or aren't comfortable using them. This problem ought not to be underestimated as we prepare information for community consumption.

The second site is Statistical Literacy. This site provides a series of resources and bibliographic references to identifying, quantifying, and addressing the problems of statistical illiteracy.

Take a look. How do you address statistical literacy in your community? A community group in Sarasota, Florida, called SCOPE, implemented a training program to help the community understand how to use the data contained in their indicators set. On a global scale, this training in Amman, Jordan, is based on a course called "Indicators for Policy Management."

What's your story?

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Adapting to New Technology

As we examine new data display tools and new data sets, we wrestle with the key questions of innumeracy, statistical literacy, and making technology accessible and user-friendly to a broad set of people in the community.

Send me your ideas about helping your community understand and use your indicator systems. I'll share my favorites soon.

In the meantime, here's a quick reminder that the issues we face aren't new:

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2007/introducing-the-book-p1.php

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