Integrating ‘education for sustainable development’ in statistics classes: visual analysis of social and economic data with gapminder

Sustainable development goals (SDGs) address various aspects of future human development such as poverty, pollution, or climate change. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) seeks to encourage students to actively participate and consider these issues in sustainable development. Following design-based research approaches, our study aims to identify opportunities for integrating ESD into statistics education. We describe the main features of an ESD-integrated learning trajectory for middle school students exploring sets of ESD related data visually with the software Gapminder. The outcomes of our study suggest that (1) Students’ engagement in forming statistical models of various countries’ sustainable development developed their abilities to generate statistical questions (2) Their intuitive knowledge of statistical concepts was further formalized during their subsequent analyses.