The COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil: how statistics education may contribute to unravel the reality behind the charts

Abstract

The world is now facing the most severe health, social, and economic event of the last hundred years, which has made the need to acquire statistical thinking to interpret the information disseminated on a daily basis by the media clear to society. This article proposes a discussion on the role that statistics education might play in supporting the acquisition of such knowledge, contributing to the development of critical citizens, aware of their social responsibility. In this context, we present examples of curves and other charts to demonstrate how to use the several levels defined by experts in reading and interpreting the charts. At a more advanced level, these examples will allow discussion on the impacts of this epidemic on the most vulnerable population in Brazil. The charts presented reveal a great regional inequality, suggesting that mortality due to the virus is distinguished by region and micro-region when considering access to hospital beds. The examples signpost ways for educators to be able to develop projects or research based on the discussion on the reality of the pandemic, the necessary public policies, and how political coordination grounded on science and on a humanitarian vision would have mitigated the Brazilian tragedy.

A Multi-Country Study of Teachers’ Beliefs About Implications of COVID-19 for Changing the Teaching of Statistics and Mathematics

“…Teachers of mathematics and statistics face new professional dilemmas because of the pandemic (da Silva et al, 2021). We argue that this requires that school systems assist teachers to engage with the mismatch between the established (intended) curriculum, and new societal needs in the media.…”

Exponential behaviour and variational practices in Chilean newscasts: a socioepistemological view

“…Another point we make is that, in school, rather than evoking realistic situations forced to be treated with the underlying logic of school mathematics, real problems of the real world should be incorporated (Cantoral, 2013 ; Cordero, 2016 ; da Silva et al, 2021 ). Now, doing this implies not only bringing the real-world problem into the classroom, but also the way in which mathematical knowledge is viewed and used in such everyday environments (Espinoza et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The use of graphs in different types of media has become a fundamental tool to facilitate communication to the general public regarding the COVID-19 pandemic (Kwon et al, 2021 ). During this pandemic, the media have become important allies of health agencies in disseminating to the public information about preventive and control measures (da Silva et al, 2021 ; Parada & Zambrano, 2020 ). Despite the fact that, for the most part, research on graph studies has been carried out in the field of journalism (e.g., Dick, 2015 ), it is necessary, in agreement with Kwon et al ( 2021 ), that research in mathematics education also pay attention to the way in which graphs are used in the media.…”

Is my visualization better than yours? Analyzing factors modulating exponential growth bias in graphs

“…Recent papers have called for designing interventions that could increase statistical literacy in general ( Gal, 2002 ; Gould, 2017 ; Weiland, 2017 ; Engel, 2021 ), and the understanding of the exponential bias ( Sieroń, 2020 ; Munoz-Rubke et al, 2022 ) alongside with the scales used ( Menge et al, 2018 ; Watson and Callingham, 2020 ; Ciccione et al, 2022 ) in particular. For each scale condition we came up with short explanations accompanied by graphs that take into account the propositions expressed in several recent studies, including instructions on the organization of the log scale ( Ciccione et al, 2022 ); the presentation and labelling in the graphs ( Heckler et al, 2013 ; Menge et al, 2018 ); driving the participants’ attention to certain elements of the graph ( da Silva et al, 2021 ) etc.…”