Every week we are confronted with a range of polls and survey results about people’s attitudes on Scotland’s constitutional future. Newspapers and TV magazines are full of them, campaigners use them to substantiate their points and online discussion users engage with them to convince others of their views. It is difficult to evaluate how to engage with all this information and in particular to evaluate the quality of it to derive meaningful interpretations.

This is particularly true for younger people who may be engaging with this sort of information as they are able to take part in democratic vote at this level for the first time. The lowering of the voting age to 16 for the referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future raised questions about young people’s abilities to engage with political issues. The survey conducted of 14-17 year olds by our team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh in April/May 2013 showed a positive perspective: The first-time voters to be were interested in politics and mostly wanting to take part. However, the majority also stated that they wanted other information to better understand politics and the discussions about the referendum.

This is encouraging. We seem to be looking at a group of young people that is really interested and rather than being politically apathetic, as some commentators wrongly claim, mostly, they want to dig deeper and engage with the debates.

These thoughts form the motivation for a set of teaching materials developed by a team of researchers from three projects funded under the Future of the UK and Scotland programme by the ESRC. These projects, coordinated through the Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) bring together researchers from the University of Strathclyde, ScotCen Social Research and the University of Edinburgh. Together we developed a pack of teaching materials that engages with attitudes towards the referendum and related issues. It is available for free and is aimed at teachers who want to use additional materials in their classroom to discuss how to interpret data on attitudes with their students. The materials are politically neutral – they aim to help enhance the critical ability of young people to engage with attitudinal data on the issue and in general.

The materials contain exercises making use of the survey on 14-17 year olds – so that school students can engage with findings from their own peer group making the issues discussed relevant for them. There are further sections that engage with using online resources on the WhatScotlandThinks showing where to find more data and how to confidently interpret different representations thereof. The discussions are complemented by exercises discussing the validity of statements made in discussions in online media and social networks as well as sections that could be used by teachers to introduce students to survey design and sampling methods. The materials contain exercises with low difficulty (which could be used by teachers in a great variety of subjects) and advanced sections (which may be most interesting for specialised subjects, like Advanced Modern Studies).

In order to make the materials relevant and useful, we incorporated comments we got from school students during the pilot of the survey in the initial design. We then got helpful comments from teachers on the materials which we used to enhance them further and then piloted the materials in some schools – which helped us get additional feedback to develop the final version of the materials which is available through the following link: https://www.aqmen.ac.uk/Resources/IndyRef/TeachingMaterials