Hi everyone,

Meaningful Math is a four-year NSF-funded collaboration between PBS NewsHour and Knology to understand how people make sense of numbers in the news and produce better quantitative news content. 

This grant provides a too-rare opportunity to reflect on how we are telling stories and to think critically about ways we do that better. We benefit, but more importantly, the ultimate goal is that our audience benefits, absorbing a more meaningful sense of the data and numbers that surround us every day.

Right now, we're focusing on polls to take advantage of people's fascination with them.

Here are some things we're especially proud of thus far!

On the news production side:

We’ve continued to explore new ways to report and share polling data as we approach the 2022 midterm elections. One area we continue to assess is how to visually depict margin of error! 

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-have-the-advantage-right-now-on-key-issues-and-midterm-elections
• Here, we tested out a new way of illustrating margin-of-error as part of our polling coverage. We wanted to do more to emphasize the range of these poll responses so that people have a truer sense of what the polling data says (and doesn’t say).
  
  
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/more-americans-approve-of-bidens-leadership-as-russia-invades-ukraine
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/4-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-biden-ahead-of-state-of-the-union
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/young-americans-are-less-likely-than-others-to-be-vaccinated-most-still-say-they-see-it-as-a-social-responsibility
• We continue to leverage our polling partnership as a way to take the temperature on attitudes primarily among U.S. adults. But we are also doing more to broaden our polling reach among younger population groups, asking them about the pandemic and climate change.
  

To further highlight the science and research around what we have learned about the coronavirus, we explore key issues, like what it means to be “fully vaccinated,” the nature of the nation’s COVID testing strategy and more. The idea is that these stories contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the pandemic so that people are equipped with knowledge to help them then make more informed decisions. 

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-does-it-mean-to-be-fully-vaccinated
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-the-smartest-way-for-the-u-s-to-use-covid-tests

We also want to better understand how systemic racism has dictated access and affordability of health care and resources, widening disparities for certain communities in disproportionate ways. 

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-suicides-tied-to-overdose-tell-us-about-disparities-in-mental-health-care

On the research side, since this time last year we’ve 

• Been busy getting audience feedback through surveys and focus groups
• Published an empirical piece on numbers in the U.S. news landscape and an editorial in Fast Company about the importance of uncertainty (P.S. we didn’t write the headline!).

Together, we're currently working on:

• Style guides, workshops, and information to support journalists in this work (for example, check out the stats sweep pieces on the Knology site!) 
• We've got a few more papers in the peer-review pipeline, too. Each one has an associated implications sheet for journalists that we'll release as soon as the paper is accepted.

We’d love to hear from you!

Hi all. Patti from the NewsHour here. Let us know any q's you have about making polls or indeed making any number-centric content more easily grasped!

Hey everybody! I'm Laura Santhanam from the PBS NewsHour, and I'm so excited to hear your insightful comments and questions this week. Really looking forward to it!

This is really interesting. I am curious if you will be providing classroom materials that teachers of statistics classes can use in their classes to further educate people about polling data?

Science communication has been shown to be much more important now than ever before. We saw how the botched communication surrounding the early days of the pandemic culminated into apathy to vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions. I think the value of science communication trascends the use in political polls as eloquently illustrated here. Perhaps this is an avenue for this project to be extended into -- the healthcare domain. Good stuff! I voted!!

I love this!! I spend a lot of time on polls both for population/sample talks as well as in confidence intervals.  One of the things my students note at the end of the semester is that they're on the hunt for margins of error when they see polls on the news!!  That makes me happy :) 

Interesting project.  Great to see the focus on effective science communication connected directly to current issues (like COVID) and widely used techniques such as polling.  Does your research include any assessment of the impact on the journalists' understanding of the concepts, or on the effectiveness of their reporting after they have used these tools (in terms of audience understanding, or even the characteristics of their reporting)?

Thanks @Ekundayo Shittu. We appreciate your vote. We actually also worked with Knology on a Rapid grant around COVID. I can send you the report on that if you're interested. send your email to me at pparson@newshour.org. 

 

Thanks, @Joan Ferrini-Mundy.  The information that Knology has shared from their focus groups and analysis have proven very useful in our day-to-day reporting, helping us be more careful in how we share concepts, numbers, graphics and even to question how we use numbers. As to whether our direct audience benefits, we hope so given the greater clarity!

Great project. I appreciate the focus on the trustworthiness and accuracy of polling especially considering the political climate.

What is your gauge of how the public will or has responded to more accurate and informed polling? 

Do you have evidence from journalists about the effectiveness of the program and how well journalists were able to understand math concepts and decipher a poll’s value?

Understanding of how to read data and how to be critical of presentations of data is an issue of deep importance. I think we all are wondering whether democracy can survive without these critical skills.

I am so curious about what you are learning during this process. It seems that you are working mainly with adults. For us educators, what do you see as being major misunderstandings amongst those you work with? Do you show the same poll results in different forms and then gather information about what individuals glean from these different forms? If so, what are the big a-has for your team? What are you seeing and what is one example you might give us about what you have shifted as a result.

Thank you for this important work.

I agree with Joi. Many of the projects being shared here (including mine) are looking into novel ways to engage and/or teach students in formal or semi-formal settings. But 'Meaningful Math' really has more to do with a functional democracy. I have an indelible memory from my childhood when one of my uncles was teasing me for studying too much. He told me that none of the math I was working on would actually matter later on. You can probably guess what his political stripes look like now. I do fear that with many adults, the die has already been cast and nothing shy of a deeply personal or traumatic experience can open minds. But I would sure love to be proven wrong on this and at a minimum, the lessons learned through this project should be invaluable for building a data-literate population from K-12 students.

Those are all fair points. Given the seismic shift in trust in public opinion polling that has taken place over the course of recent election cycles, we felt this would pose a great opportunity to think deeply about why and how the public has lost faith in fundamentals around polling and offer resources and different approaches to help people better understand the numbers they see and why and how those numbers do (or don't) reflect their environments and experiences. 

But to Jena's point, this is one slice of what we're doing as we are continuing to work on math concepts tied to the pandemic (understanding the scale of loss, nuance in COVID data, etc.), climate change and more.

There's certainly a wide range of issues from which to choose.

Very valuable project - I love the focus on better preparing news people to understand and report on statistics; I think it could be extremely impactful!

A question I have, though, is how you plan to entice your target population to engage in learning activities around this.

Thank you for sharing this project. Your approach to helping viewers understand the strengths and limitations of data presented in the news is timely and important. Does the News Hour share what it is learning from the research with others, e.g. PBS member stations? 

Hi @JamieBell In addition to the resources that Jena mentioned, we always share our best knowledge with PBS stations as we engage with them, especially around election time. We also have a slack channel with 210 public mediamembers on it.

@RafaellaBorassi In addition to what Jena said, we are planning to work with some journalism schools as well, and have already been asked to present at one. 

Wow, what a great idea to connect statistics learning with news media! Thank you for sharing :)

Thanks @Ho-Chieh Lin for stopping by. I really appreciated your video and project as well!

What important and relevant work!  I look forward to learning more about your work.  -Jessica