Data, data everywhere

Data, data everywhere and not a jot of meaning

With apologies to the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge
Chris Durbin
chris.durbin@staffordshire.gov.uk

This title of this article may seem harsh and overstated but spatial data is now being used all over the world to make policy and take decisions by all scales of local government, national and international on social economic and environmental matters. Spatial data is used for target setting in employment, health and education. It is perhaps just because this is the case that as geography teachers we need to consider carefully how we teach about exploding plethora of spatial data. Much of this data is now made public on the Internet. This article will enable you to access and make use of data for teaching and learning geography.

It is therefore vital that more people begin to understand data and spatial data, not only what it might represent but also how it can mislead. Patterns on maps can reflect reality but also can be so misleading and the way a map is presented can lead students to misinterpret the data. The selection and rejection of data may too mislead. Data association and correlation can be mistaken as causation.

An understanding of the complexity of data is not achieved overnight and therefore it is necessary to build this through KS3, GCSE and A level. There are several ways that this might be achieved in the classroom. The first is by regular use of five open-ended questions about the data:

What does the data show?
What might be the explanations?
What doesn’t the data show?
What other data might we need to be more sure?

The second is by building regular real data activities into units of work. Building from year 7 onwards, it is possible to devise activities that challenge thinking and interpretation of data, for example:

Rogue data activities where pupils look for errors in the data represented;
True, false or maybe interpretation statements in response to data on maps, graphs or in tables;
Comparing different representations of the same data to illustrate how careful it is necessary to be;
Comparing spatial patterns of data to se if there are relationships between them

The Internet has multiple sources of data that will help teachers devise data activities themselves. Your local council, regional government office or regional health authority is bound to have data on the web. The best way to find this is in a web search engine, which only searches for UK web sites www.altavista.co.uk or www.lycos.co.uk

With just two data web sites it is possible to build many learning activities:

1. For national data, UK Statbase www.statistics.gov.uk has the added advantage of getting data and being able to use it in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel

2. For International data, Infonation 2000 www.un.org/Pubs/CyberSchoolBus/ is designed specially for school aged children It allows you to create tables of data and download them into a spreadsheets very easily. This will be constantly updated as new data is collected and processed.

Tutorials:

Using Infonation 2000
Using UK National Stats

This page last updated 25 September 2000