Along with colleagues Abby Smith and Mena Whalen, I co-designed and co-taught the course Introduction to Social Statistics and Data Literacy at the Cook County Department of Corrections as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP).

This course used real-world social data to introduce statistical concepts and empower students to explore, understand, and reason about data about society. Topics included methods for collection, summarization, presentation, and interpretation of data, such as sampling, means, proportions, and linear association. Students practiced critically examining quantitative claims and visualizations that appear in the media and other publications. The course introduced students to a variety of statistical techniques with the goal of answering socially-relevant questions and increasing data literacy in an information-rich world. We wanted students to leave the course being able to:

• Understand how data is used to answer socially-relevant questions
• Interpret and critique data visualizations appearing in the media
• Recognize the importance of data collection and sampling methods and determine how they affect conclusions drawn from data
• Critically examine and evaluate data-based claims and decisions
• Understand issues in data ethics and the responsibility of collectors and users of data

The reading list we used for this course can be found below.

Read more about how Prison Education Unlocks Potential and a powerful article written by an NPEP student here.

Course Reading List

Aschwanden, Christie. “Failure Is Moving Science Forward.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 24 Mar. 2016, fivethirtyeight.com/features/failure-is-moving-science-forward/. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Belkin, Douglas. “SAT to Give Students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background.” WSJ, Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Cohn, Nate. “We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.” The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2016, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/upshot/the-error-the-polling-world-rarely-talks-about.html. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Dominguez, Sabrina. “Big Data Ethics | Controversial Data Science Experiments.” Data Science Blog | AI, ML, Big Data Analytics, Data Science Blog | AI, ML, big data analytics, 22 May 2018, blog.datasciencedojo.com/big-data-ethics-10-experiments/. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Featherstone, Liza. “How Big Data Is ‘Automating Inequality.’” The New York Times, 4 May 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/review/automating-inequality-virginia-eubanks.html. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Khullar, Dhruv. “We’re Bad at Evaluating Risk. How Doctors Can Help.” The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/upshot/were-bad-at-evaluating-risk-how-doctors-can-help.html. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Kiefer, Daniel, et al. “Statistics, Civil Rights and the US Supreme Court: A Cautionary Tale.” Significance, vol. 13, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 30–33, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00898.x/full, 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00898.x. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Koeth-Baker, Maggie. “10 Times Correlation Was Not Causation.” Mentalfloss.Com, 28 June 2016, mentalfloss.com/article/82108/10-times-correlation-was-not-causation.

Menasce-Horowitz, Juliana. “Americans See Advantages and Challenges in Country’s Growing Racial and Ethnic Diversity.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, 8 May 2019, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Raper, Simon. “Why Good Science Is Good Business.” Significance, vol. 14, no. 1, 2019, pp. 38–41, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2017.01002.x/full. Accessed 11 July 2019.

REYES, CECILIA. “Chicago Slips in Population, but Still Third-Largest City in U.S.” Videtteonline.Com, 23 May 2019, www.videtteonline.com/news/chicago-slips-in-population-but-still-third-largest-city-in/article_321e405a-7d75-11e9-ae17-a7d167261a17.html.

Rothschield, David. “When You Hear the Margin of Error Is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead.” The New York Times, 5 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/upshot/when-you-hear-the-margin-of-error-is-plus-or-minus-3-percent-think-7-instead.html. Accessed 11 July 2019.

Starr, Sonja. “Opinion | Sentencing, by the Numbers.” The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/opinion/sentencing-by-the-numbers.html. Accessed 11 July 2019.

“What’s Going on in This Graph?” The New York Times, 2019, www.nytimes.com/column/whats-going-on-in-this-graph.