See the live dashboard for CensusAtSchool 2023-2024

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Thanks to Kristina Sheppard from Ashburton Intermediate School for sharing these photos of her Huaketetere 4 class taking part in CensusAtSchool yesterday:

Some quotes from her students:

It was so much fun.

I learned how to measure accurately and correctly for the first time.

Was it Maths really? I don’t believe that doing that was Maths! I had so much fun and it was so good to do it.

It was exciting.

I learned how to change grams into kilograms.

Thanks to Heather Collins from Our Lady Star of the Sea School for sharing these photos of her class taking part in CensusAtSchool yesterday:

 

Thank you for helping make today our biggest CensusAtSchool launch ever!

1,871 teachers registered
1,010 schools registered
1,877 students took part today

We look forward to a big day tomorrow. The survey remains open until the end of 2022.

We are proud to announce our new live dashboard. See if your school is one of the highest participating schools and fun stats coming in as students take part!

CensusAtSchool New Zealand – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa celebrates the launch of their tenth biennial survey today to once again comprehensively chart children’s views of their own lives. The large national survey will give another intriguing glimpse into school children’s lives.

Thousands of primary, intermediate, and secondary school students around the country will share their views on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, the amount of time they spend on digital devices, where young people get their news from, and how they felt about lockdown learning. Senior students will be asked to also share their own attitudes to when they think it should be legal to drive, vote, buy alcohol, and vape.

The students are taking part in CensusAtSchool New Zealand – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa, a non-profit, online educational project that aims to bring statistics to life in both English and Māori-medium classrooms. It is run by the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Stats NZ.

Supervised by teachers, students from years 3-13 anonymously answer questions in English or te reo Māori on digital devices. Some questions involve practical activities such as measuring the length of their feet and weighing their laden school bags. 

The tenth biennial edition of CensusAtSchool is expected to have the highest number of schools, teachers, and students participating. More than 30,000 schoolchildren are expected to participate in CensusAtSchool this year. As of launch this morning, approximately 1,800 teachers from almost 1,000 schools had already registered – the highest figures ever. 

Co-director Rachel Cunliffe says, “We’re passionate about getting real, relevant data about New Zealand students into their hands so that they can grow their data science superpower skills.”

Rachel Cunliffe, a former University of Auckland statistics lecturer who now runs a digital design company, says teachers are always looking for rich cross-curricular classroom activities.

Professor Chris Wild, statistics education expert and co-director says, “The students experience the whole statistical cycle – they complete the survey and then use statistical methods to explore the data and tell the stories in it. It helps students see the importance of statistics in today’s world – and they love finding out what other students are thinking and doing.”

CensusAtSchool is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people and is carried out in Australia, Canada, the United States, Japan, and South Africa. The countries share some questions so comparisons can be made.

Preview the questions and see which schools are taking part on CensusAtSchool’s website: www.censusatschool.org.nz

Need help exploring data using technology in your teaching and learning?

Catch up on the latest professional development for Data Science. These webinars are a great starting point to help structure and support STEM opportunities for your colleagues and students.

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Recommend starting with: What Kinds of Questions Do Students Generate as They View Data Visualizations?

“Thinking about questions makes me think of more questions.”

CensusAtSchool New Zealand – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa celebrates the launch of their tenth biennial survey next month to once again comprehensively chart children’s views of their own lives.

From May 10, the voice of Kiwi students will be heard on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, the amount of time they spend on digital devices, and their own attitudes to when they think it should be legal to drive, vote, buy alcohol, and vape.

New to the survey in 2021 is a question that explores where young people get their news from and how they felt about lockdown learning.

The survey now includes improved bi-lingual support with the ability to toggle between English and te reo Māori.

Another new feature includes an audio option for the English questionnaire to support students with reading difficulties.

CensusAtSchool New Zealand – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa, is a non-profit, online educational project that aims to bring statistics to life in both English and Māori-medium classrooms. Supervised by teachers, students from Years 3-13 anonymously answer 34 questions in English or te reo Māori, and later explore the results in class. CensusAtSchool runs every two years, and in 2019, more than 32,000 students took part, representing approximately 500 schools and 1,000 teachers.

You can preview the questions here. See the registered schools.

CensusAtSchool is a collaborative project involving teachers, the University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics, Stats NZ, and the Ministry of Education.

It is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people and is carried out in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the US, Japan, and South Africa. The countries share some questions so comparisons can be made.

In New Zealand, CensusAtSchool is co-directed by Prof Chris Wild of the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland and Rachel Cunliffe, a former lecturer in the department who owns web design studio cre8d design and is a commentator on youth culture and online communications. She is the principal media spokesperson for CensusAtSchool and can be contacted at census@stat.auckland.ac.nz or phone 027 3833 746. A high-quality, copyright-free photo of Rachel is available for download here.

Key dates:

  • May 10: CensusAtSchool survey goes live and schools start taking part.
  • May 24*: Interesting initial statistics from the survey data released to media.
  • May 31*: Second release of statistics from the survey data released to media.

* Date dependent on response rate

Ihaka Lecture Series 2021

For a general audience (with an interest in Statistics and/or Computing)

Learn more

Register for (free) in-person attendance

10 March at 6:30pm

Data Science in the Connected Era
Dr Simon Urbanek, Senior Lecturer, Department of Statistics, University of Auckland

17 March at 6:30pm

Implementing a Machine-Learning Tool to Support High-Stakes Decisions in Child Welfare: A case study in Human Centred AI
Professor Rhema Vaithianathan, Centre for Social Data Analytics, AUT

 

24 March at 6:30pm

Modelling to support the COVID-19 response in Aotearoa New Zealand
Dr Rachelle Binny, Manaaki Whenua-Landcare Research and Te Pūnaha Matatini

Data-Driven Art

Data-Driven Art

One of ODI’s NSF-funded projects, Building Students’ Data Literacy through the Co-design of Curriculum by Mathematics and Art Teachers, is creating learning experiences for middle school students which integrate data science with art.

This past spring, the project researchers conducted a classroom pilot study of a 3-week long unit in collaboration with a math and art teacher pair. The study’s goals were to explore how students use mathematics and art to describe and make claims from data, and to examine the concepts and skills in visual arts, mathematics and data literacy evident in their work. The unit—co-designed with teachers—guided students in two data-based inquiry activities. One activity focused on collecting and using data to describe their experiences during the pandemic, and the second focused on exploring data on teen use of social media collected by Pew Research. Both activities culminated in the creation of art pieces based on the data they analyzed.

Our Data Pathways Community of Practice—for colleges and community colleges building data programs—has more than 25 members and is meeting virtually on a monthly basis.
Join the Community of Practice
Initial results from the students’ culminating art projects suggest that students were engaged in thinking about the patterns in the data, what they meant in context, and how to represent them through art. However, students varied in the extent to which they connected both their inferences and artistic choices to the data evidence, sometimes drawing on personal experience to make inferences, rather than the data, and results from the study suggest students needed more careful scaffolding for making data-based inferences. In the top left example below, a student drew a representation of how many people they saw in the last 5 days of the pandemic and included a key to understanding the data. In the top right exhibit, the yarn represents the percentage of teens who use social media, based on data from the Pew Research survey. And in the bottom left image, a student created a 3-D abstraction of the same Pew data (on teen internet use) using more colorful crayons to represent the teens who use the internet, and using structure to represent the student’s claim that teens who don’t use the internet are more organized and focused.
Due to the pandemic, the research team wasn’t able to pilot test in as many classrooms as they had originally planned, but they were able to adapt the units for online and asynchronous use, using the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (wise.berkeley.edu) platform. And in this school year, they are working with art and math teachers from four middle schools to build on last year’s findings, and codesign and pilot more arts-integrated data literacy units. This year they hope to incorporate dance as well as visual arts. (Aren’t you curious about dancing to data?!)

We don’t know the form the modules will take this year given the pandemic, but the team is developing curricula designs and plans that are flexible enough to adapt to the different teacher and student contexts—a challenging process, as school circumstances are changing rapidly.

Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy holiday!

Randy Kochevar
Director, ODI

Last week the University of California sent a momentous email to 20,000 high schools announcing that they would now accept data science as an alternative to algebra 2 – this has huge implications for schools & students. Read the full announcement