An educational portal to facilitate statistical literacy for the Malaysian community

Abstract

In the last decades, a considerable number of studies investigated the teaching and learning of statistics. The implications of these studies have changed the content and structure of statistics. Hence, the applications of statistics to understand the world around us should be followed by the learning of statistical concepts so that the students are aware that statistics is an important tool to solve practical life problems. There must be some platform such as materials or articles that discuss explicitly the applications of statistics in various area that reach of students. An educational web portal by the name of Dunia Matematik has been delegated to meet this need. Apart from the sections which provide numerous articles that portray statistics in real life, the portal also provides articles on history in mathematics, popular mathematicians, online quizzes, technology in mathematics education and arts in mathematics. Based on ARCS model on motivation, the four components of the model, namely attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction are integrated in the design of the articles and activities. A rich collection of such resources which present authentic data could supplement text book materials which heavily focus onto statistical concepts and procedures. Besides motivating learning, it is expected that the web portal has the potential to develop statistical literacy, an ability to comprehend and infer the data. The final part of the paper will describe some resources that have been developed.