RM wrote:
Kate Pickett's response made depressing reading - presumably the inability to read a graph and understand statistics extends to those 'high educated people' who run the economy?
Have you ever doubted this? Not only do they not understand the methods and limitations, they don't want to! At times this may be an act. I suspect Tony Blair claiming he could hardly send an email was aimed at the "I'm just a regular bloke" level of non-elitism. Similarly, it appears almost all senior managers have a pathetic naïve faith that any data in "a database" is thereby rendered accurate, complete and secure. Every public IT project appears to replicate Stamp's statistical law.
When teaching use of graphs, the exercise I set for students was to critique graphs using prompts such as:
A) what does the graph *show* (lines, points, bars, areas) and what do these represent?
B) is the interest in the absolute amounts (watch for bars with broken axes!) or the relative pattern?
C) is there a stated message - in a caption, in the nearby text - or features to draw our intention to a feature or pattern in the data?
D) apart from the stated message, what other information is implicit? (eg, scatterplot shows relationship, but also implicitly shows number of data points, spacing along axes)
E) does the graph actually justify or support the stated message?
F) could the graph be improved? ("Presentation quality" often just means bold and garish; I look for choices in the scaling and labelling of axes, aspect ratio to give appropriate emphasis to differences, highlighting with line styles, marking of points, etc).
It's quite an eye-opener to see how many published graphs appear to be just as first produced. Would you like to see published papers that were first draft texts, never edited?
Responding to Rachel, the problem in schools may be that graphs are taught in *maths*, and many pupils continue to have real difficulty relating "maths world" to the real world. At one level they can manipulate numbers as ciphers, but when they do that the numbers lose any external meaning.
Personal comment - not an official view
Allan
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