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In this era of increasingly fast communication people are being exposed to quantitative information, from national and international sources, through a range of media including newspapers, magazines, television, radio, pod-casts, YouTube and other areas of the Internet. Contexts include health statistics, environmental issues, traffic statistics, wars, gun laws and so on. It is becoming more and more important that citizens are able to critically read and interpret this information, and to do so requires an understanding of statistical concepts. Research has shown that students are motivated and engaged in learning through the use of authentic, real life tasks. The media provides current information, which can be used to help develop both students’ awareness of how social issues are constructed as well as vital statistical concepts. This paper proposes that secondary school students\' application of a model for statistical analysis to material taken from media sources, enhances their understanding of statistical concepts. This model, called the Five Step Framework, is described and exemplified for the particular context of opinion polling.

In this era of increasingly fast communication people are being exposed to quantitative information, from national and international sources, through a range of media including newspapers, magazines, television, radio, pod-casts, YouTube and other areas of the Internet. Contexts include health statistics, environmental issues, traffic statistics, wars, gun laws and so on. It is becoming more and more important that citizens are able to critically read and interpret this information, and to do so requires an understanding of statistical concepts. Research has shown that students are motivated and engaged in learning through the use of authentic, real life tasks. The media provides current information, which can be used to help develop both students’ awareness of how social issues are constructed as well as vital statistical concepts. This paper proposes that secondary school students\'' application of a model for statistical analysis to material taken from media sources, enhances their understanding of statistical concepts. This model, called the Five Step Framework, is described and exemplified for the particular context of opinion polling.

This study examined students' perception between short research experiences (SRE) courses and full-semester course research experiences (CRE) using the Persistence in the Sciences (PITS) survey and the interview questionnaire. The study also aimed to correlate the influence of student's demographic as a predictive indicator for Project Ownership Scores (POS) and Quantitative Literacy (QL) score means. The three courses studied at the University of North Texas were Biology for Science Majors Laboratory (BIOL 1760 SRE), Microbiology with Tiny Earth (BIOL 2042 Tiny Earth SRE), and Introductory Biology Research Laboratory I (BIOL 1750 SEA-PHAGES CRE). The mean scores for the PITS categories leaned favorably towards the research component of each laboratory course assessed in this study. The interview questionnaire showed 66% of the students in the SRE courses and 90% of the students in the CRE course preferred the research component of the lab. Paired survey demographic analysis for BIOL 1760 SRE showed significance for the Science Community Values with associate/bachelor's degree. BIOL 1750 SEA-PHAGES CRE showed significance in three of the six categories when comparing means for Project Ownership Emotion, Self-Efficacy, and Science Identity with Gender. Binary logistics was used to build a regression model to predict demographics with approximately 65% to 75% accuracy for each course. When analyzing students' QL score, the demographic category "Ethnicity" showed significance for BIOL 2042 Tiny Earth SRE. Categorizing the correct response into two categories for the QL test scores, the SRE and CRE courses, and analyzing the PITS scores for paired data sets showed that there was significance in the Networking category for the question "I have discussed my research in this course with professors other than my course instructor." The validated PITS, POS, and interview questionnaire could be a tool for use to analyze laboratories at UNT that offer a SRE or CRE component and to understand students' perceptions on the effectiveness of the laboratory.