Best Cooperative Project Award in Statistical Literacy 2021

Announcement of Winner

The ISLP received 4 nominations for this Award. The winner was:

• TREND — from Russia

TREND is a school competition in statistics conducted by the Russian Association of Statisticians since the 2017-18 academic year. The competition uses online technologies, helping children from remote regions to participate. Teams from more than 100 schools participated in the competition.

The competition is included in the presidential program and winners receive a special scholarship to study at university. But more importantly, the competition teaches children to enjoy statistical research, helping them to develop an interest in statistics and an understanding of how statistical knowledge can be used in practice.

This interactive map➶ shows the locations of the finalist teams. By changing the scale, you can see the buildings of schools, or, for example, the central statistical office in Moscow, where the jury worked. By clicking on the contest avatar, you can see all the participants of the final quiz.

Other nominations were:

• Finnish Statistical Society and Statistics Finland, collaborating with the ISLP. The Finnish Statistical Society and Statistics Finland work together to supported the ISLP Project, helping to promote statistical literacy worldwide.
• European Statistics Competition. Submitted by Alicia Fernández from the National Statistical Institute of Spain (INE-Spain) on behalf of the coordination board of the European Statistics Competition. The European Statistics Competition (ESC) is a statistical literacy contest addressed to secondary school students, organised by Eurostat and the national statistical offices of several European countries. It is a cooperative project at European level that started in 2017. The initiative aims to stimulate the awareness of sound statistics in an age of fake news. It does so by promoting and strengthening statistical literacy and curiosity among secondary school students, while encouraging teachers to use new educative materials based on official statistics. https://www.esc2021.eu➶
• PISTAR Initiatives in the Time of COVID-19. PISTAR stands for the Pak Institute of Statistical Training And Research (Lahore, Pakistan). The series of initiatives launched by PISTAR subsequent to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic included online Workshop, online Symposium of World Statisticians, ISLP International Poster Competition 2020-2021, PISTAR Statistical Consulting Service and launching the PISTAR Chronicle (Newsletter). All of the above initiatives are the fruit of cooperation and collaboration between representatives of various organizations. These include various types of institutions (a provincial bureau of statistics, a statistical society, a training institute, and a number of higher educational institutions). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAEmjJtdcTn7vAKecZTlbSw/videos➶

Competition details

The Best Cooperative Project Award in Statistical Literacy is awarded every two years, in recognition of outstanding, innovative, and influential statistical literacy projects that affect a broad segment of the general public and are fruit of the cooperation of different types of institutions (national statistical offices, schools, statistical societies, media, libraries etc.)

Submitted projects should have at least some of the following characteristics:

• Be current and have the potential to remain so in the future.
• Have free access to the project resources and membership.
• Educate on concepts of statistical theory and data analysis, their use in the development of information about countries and societies, and their application in a broad spectrum of disciplines and areas of society.
• Have pedagogically sound contents suitable for a general audience.
• Involve two or more institutions that would not usually work closely together. Examples are projects that involve cooperation between:
• A national statistical institute, a statistical society and a knowledge centre, such as the winners of the 2015 competition with the product 'Exploristica', which was the result of cooperation between Sociedade Portuguesa de Estatística (SPE), Instituto Nacional de Estatistica (INE), and Ciência Viva in Portugal.
• Or between a national statistical institute, a statistical society, such as the winners of the 2013 competition with the 'CensusAtSchools', which was the result of cooperation between the Royal Statistical Society and the Office of National Statistics) in the United Kingdom.
• Other examples could be cooperation among universities and schools, or schools and statistical societies or media experts, statistical societies, national statistical offices, schools or combinations thereof.
• Be attractive to a wide audience, have “fun” appeal, invite participation. Characteristics that make it such are: Easy to find material, dynamism, variety, sound pedagogy, updated and contemporary subject matter.
• Have archives that are widely available. For example, if there is a regularly run contest, then past winners should be known.
• Have international outreach and make creative use of available resources. For example, a web page in English would help the dissemination of the resources to many countries.

There is no fixed format for applications, but entries should have sufficient information to allow the judging panel to assess the quality of the entry against the criteria outlined above.

Timetable: Proposals should be sent to the ISLP Deputy Director, Steve MacFeely by the end of March 2021.

Prizes: The winning project will receive 1000 euros.

Judging panel:

• Chair: Steve MacFeely (Ireland)
• James Kaleli Musyoka (Kenya)
• Gail Burrill (USA)
• Manfred Borovcnik (Austria)