Analysis of errors made by students when interpreting biased news with graphics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/revistafuentes.2023.22052Keywords:
Statistical education, Education, Graph, Information media, Civic education, Information society, Communication statistics, Life skillsAbstract
Nowadays, citizens receive a great deal of information from the media, press or social networks. On some occasions, this information includes statistical graphs that contain biases. Therefore, it is essential that citizens develop adequate knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to adopt a critical attitude before accepting them as true. For this reason, framed in the theoretical framework of civic statistics, errors made by 305 students from four different Compulsary Secondary Education schools when interpreting biased news media items that included graphs were analysed. Neither of the two news items took into account the size of the population, which could lead to erroneous conclusions. It was concluded that a large proportion of the subjects surveyed assume the information they receive to be true, without first criticising it. In addition, they are not able to interpret certain graphics and they also have difficulties in understanding that the context of the news item may be essential for drawing accurate conclusions about it. Knowing about these errors will be fundamental in order to be able to work on them later, with special emphasis on the most common ones, and thus form statistically literate citizens.
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