Data analysis can be introduced at any stage during a student's school career and its introduction does not have to be restricted to contexts labeled "statistics lessons". In this paper the view is taken that wherever and whenever data analysis appears in the curriculum, the aim is that students will learn something about data analysis as a skill in its own right, as well as about its use as a tool for investigation. Some aspects of data analysis, in common with many other practical skills, may have to be learned rather than taught. The teacher's function is then to facilitate the learning process, to provide an environment in which data analysis can be carried out, to make encouraging suggestions and to stop students from going too far down a fruitless path. Often the teacher will be learning along with the students. In order to start on a program for learning data analysis, data are needed and the first part of this paper discusses what kinds of data might be suitable and how to obtain them. Suggestions are then made as to how start studying a data set and what might be done on an initial analysis.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education