Aims
- To find out some ways well-being is quantitatively measured
- To interpret data and represent it in different ways
What you need
- Resource sheet Measuring well-being
What to do
This builds on the learning from the previous activity: what does it mean to be doing well in life?
- Give out copies of the resource sheet Measuring Well-being. This table has selected data from five countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru, Vietnam and the UK). Explain that this data comes from the World Bank, an organisation which lends money to different countries to support their development, for example road building projects or education programmes. The World Bank uses different measures to work out how ‘well’ a country is doing.
Ask pupils to look at the Measuring well-being table. Ask them some questions about the data, such as:
- What is the life expectancy in Peru?
- What percentage of the population has access to electricity in Ethiopia?
- What is the difference between the numbers of Internet users per 100 people in the UK compared to the number in India?
- Which country has the lowest life expectancy?
The pupils can work in pairs to think of their own questions about the data. They can then work with another pair to ask and answer the questions.
Discuss other ways in which the data could be presented, for example by using a bar or pie chart.
Reflection and evaluation
- What did you learn from the data?
- What surprised you?
- Do you think there are other indicators which would have been useful when we thinking about well-being which are missing from these tables?
This is adapted from Unit 3, Session 1 in Everyone Counts
