魅影直播 – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa celebrates the launch of their eleventh biennial survey today to once again comprehensively chart students鈥� views of their own lives. The large national survey will give another intriguing glimpse into school students鈥� lives.
Thousands of primary, intermediate, and secondary school students around the country will share their views on issues as wide-ranging as their favourite ice cream flavour, the amount of time they spend on digital devices, whether or not they have blocked someone in the past week, opinions on alcohol, how many close friends they have, how happy they say they are overall, and their favourite sport to play.
The students are taking part in聽魅影直播聽– TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa, a non-profit, online educational project that aims to bring statistics to life in both English and M膩ori-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 M膩ori on digital devices. Some questions involve practical activities such as measuring the length of their feet and weighing their laden school bags.
The eleventh biennial edition of CensusAtSchool is expected to have the highest number of schools, teachers, and students participating. More than 40,000 schoolchildren are expected to participate in CensusAtSchool this year. As of launch this morning, approximately 1,700 teachers from 900 schools had already registered.
Co-director Rachel Cunliffe says, 鈥淲e鈥檙e passionate about getting real, relevant data about New Zealand students into their hands so that they can grow their data science superpower skills.鈥�
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.
Anne Patel, Professional Teaching Fellow and co-director says, 鈥淚t鈥檚 so important that students experience every aspect of collecting and working with data, as they learn how data can be used to inform. Students are learning that data is all around us and they can 鈥渟ee鈥� themselves in the data to get a real feel for patterns and variation.聽 The experience helps students see the importance of statistics in today鈥檚 world 鈥� and they love finding out what other students are thinking and doing.鈥�
CensusAtSchool is part of an international effort to boost statistical capability among young people.
Preview the questions and see which schools are taking part on CensusAtSchool鈥檚 website.