My students often make fun of me, but I am not ashamed of my love for "the Pew" aka the Pew Research Center. I utilize public opinion data regularly with my AP US Government and Politics course quite often. It is one thing for a teacher to say what the major issues are facing the country, but when a teacher can show this data and explain to students how to verify what factors make a poll legit--this is critical teaching/learning.
In AP US GoPo, students are required to learn about the characteristics of a poll with high ethos, though ALL students should know about terms like margin or error and sampling size. We are regularly bombarded with data, and much of it is garbage. No matter your content area, you can find great polls and statistics for a variety of activities. I enjoy using polls and tables as Warm Up activities to spark my students' critical thinking skills, and to get them interested in the topic of the class.
Besides Pew, you should check out these fantastic polling resources:
- Pollingreport.com
- Gallup.com
- Census.gov
Here is my favorite set of data...Because I teach so many first, second, and third generation Latino immigrants (and because I am married to a first generation Latina), I "live" this data daily. I used this data at the beginning of the 2012-13 school year as an introduction into my data analysis lesson with my ESOL Government students. We ended up having some great discussions about the data and student anecdotes.
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