Why is Statistics Canada involved in education?
As the nation’s statistical agency, Statistics Canada’s role is not only to produce reams of data about our country’s social and economic life, but also to help Canadians of all ages make sense of that information. The mandate of the Education Outreach program is to make Statistics Canada information relevant and understandable to young Canadians. Numeric information surrounds us every day: in news reports, advertisements, political and social commentary, we are confronted with graphs, rates, percentages, probabilities, averages and forecasts. Today’s students need to understand what’s behind these numbers, how to use and analyse data, and when to challenge their veracity. New provincial curricula define statistics and probability as one of the five major teaching strands, from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. Young children in kindergarten are learning to collect and organize numeric information. By Grade 5, students are expected to represent information using graphs, tabl
