1. Using Education to Promote Cross-Discipline and Layperson Data Use
Genevieve Podleski
Federal reserve bank of St louis

2. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this presentation do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
@linkedlibrary

3. The data and its audience Education and outreach
Overview
Why the Fed?
The data and its audience
Education and outreach
Briefly, I’ll be discussing why the Fed is involved in this at all, the data that we’re working to get to our audiences (and who they are), and then I’ll get into our specific tools for education and outreach

4. The fed and its work
Board of Governors (Independent Government Agency)
12 Federal Reserve Banks (Private Corporations)
All produce economic data, research, and policy documents in support of the Fed’s monetary policy function.
The Federal Reserve is made up of three parts: The Board of Governors, which is an independent US government agency, the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which are private corporations which answer to the Board, and the FOMC, which is a hybrid committee with members from both of the other parts.
All of these bodies produce economic data, research, and policy documents in support of the Fed’s monetary policy function.
Most of the regional Feds also produce educational materials – in the 1960s, this grew out of a need to educate the public about the workings of the Fed itself, and has grown into projects all over the country on Fed history and economic history, banking, economics, and personal finance. Many also produce economic data related to other functions or interests of the Federal Reserve.
IMAGE: A map of the continental United States showing the borders and Bank locations of the 12 Federal Reserve districts.
*Catch me later if you want to know how and why the Fed’s map looks like this

5. Data and Education Products of the St. Louis Fed
FRED® – data aggregator
GeoFRED® – data mapping
AlFRED® – archived data snapshots
econlowdown® – open educational resources
FRASER® – digital library, including data publications
IDEAS/RePEc – economic research, including data and models
CASSIDI® – banking market data
Publications
Economic Synopses – new econ research for laypersons
Page One Economics – economic concepts for classrooms
The various Feds produced data almost from the beginning, but didn’t universally disseminate data specifically to the public until the St. Louis Fed started doing so in the 1960s.
The St. Louis Fed puts a lot of effort into producing and repurposing data for public use, and has a number of unique information products. We view this as part of upholding our mission of promoting a healthy economy through a commitment to the public interest and independence of views. I personally believe that through educating individual citizens we can promote that healthy economy through helping to make a more informed populace.
IMAGES: Logo for FRED Economic Data, logo for FRASER digital library, and logo for econlowdown economic education site.

6. The data Current US government data (GDP, CPI, unemployment)
Historical US government data (Census from 1878, Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1895, Treasury from 1789)
Federal Reserve data (interest rates, bond yields, industrial production, banking data)
NGO and foreign data (World Bank, OECD, Eurostat)
Corporate data (BofA Merrill Lynch, Equifax, FTSE Russell)
Research data (NBER, Fed economists, non-Fed economists)
Broadly, these are the general categories of data that are available through the St. Louis Fed’s public websites from a wide variety of sources. These are all free and available on the web

7. Our audience Research economists Economics instructors (all levels)
Personal finance instructors
Other subject instructors
Elementary and middle-school teachers
Students
Business analysts
Journalists
Retirees
Data geeks
Interested non-professionals
The “other subject instructors” in the bullet list on the slide encompasses history, social studies, civics, political science at the high school and college level.
The more content we add, the more we need to explain and provide context for.
IMAGE: A pie chart showing the basic breakdown of FRED users in % are teachers and students, 30% are business professionals, 30% are researchers, and 10% is “everybody else”

8. The tools we provide for data use start with the basics – how to use the tools we offer. 10 in 10 is used in high school and college classrooms to get students up to speed so that they can use FRED data in their classwork and research.
IMAGE: A screenshot of the “10 FRED Activities in 10 Minutes” lesson showing instructions on how to transform data frequency on a FRED graph
This guide, developed by an education specialist and former classroom teacher, is available at
Resource: 10 in 10

9. Resource: Data literacy lesson
This graph from a 1913 Bureau of Labor Statistics report of working hours of women in Washington, DC, which is available on FRASER. We used this as the basis for an activity I and a colleague did as part of a presentation at a national conference for history teachers last month. The presentation introduced a data literacy lesson for history teachers who may have little expertise with data but who want their students to engage analytically with graphs and charts in their primary and secondary source documents.
Like many other of our educational resources, this takes a primary source document produced by or for the policy-making community and uses it to teach classroom skills. Although this lesson is really more of a toolkit, we also have other more complete classroom lesson kits that use government and research data to teach things like women’s labor history, as our Barbie in the Labor Force lesson does.
IMAGE: A screenshot of a graph titled “Working Hours of Women Working Overtime in Department and Other Retail Stores During Christmas Season of 1911, as Shown by Individual Reports”
The lesson is available at
Resource: Data literacy lesson

10. Resource: nber data classroom lesson
This lesson uses data from the National Bureau of Economic Research Macrohistory Database to teach about the history of indoor plumbing and consumer culture in the Progressive Era. It specifically uses this research data and the FRED database tools to support AP US History teaching. We also have lessons that use historical scenarios to help teach data literacy, like one on the “Dewey Defeats Truman” debacle and the importance of keeping track of data revisions.
IMAGE: A screenshot from the “Everything Including the Kitchen Sink” lesson. The screenshot reads: Objectives: Students will [list bullet] identify factors affecting bathroom-fixture production after WWI, [list bullet] describe the economic impact those factors had in the 1920s, [list bullet] use FRED to analyze and manipulate primary economic data to develop an historical argument, [list bullet] examine primary advertising documents to show how economic phenomenon affected popular culture and attitudes about women, and [list bullet] develop AP test-taking skills by writing responses to AP short-answer questions.
This lesson is available at
Resource: nber data classroom lesson

11. Resource: FRED Interactives
FRED Interactives is one of our newest experiments in data for teaching. This is an interactive website that’s incorporated with our online teacher and student portals (both free), and which is more of a traditional online classroom tool teaching data literacy and economic concepts using data in FRED.
IMAGE: Screenshot of the FRED Interactives beta site, which shows a FRED graph and a quiz question beneath it with four possible answers. One has a red X next to it, indicating a wrong answer, and one has a yellow pointer next to it indicating the correct answer.
Resource: FRED Interactives

12. Resource: Economic synopses
Economic Synopses is an online publication that repackages and re-presents new and complex economic research for a non-economist audience. These are short summaries with simpler language and less math, but which show the conclusions the economist has reached from the data.
IMAGE: Screenshot of Economic Synopses for the article “The Connection Between Social Security Disability Insurance and High Unemployment” by David Wiczer. The screenshot shows the title, blurb, and first paragraph of the article. Note: The full html article can be read at
Resource: Economic synopses

13. Ongoing: Outreach and accessibility
Data tweets
@FedFRASER Twitter account
FRED Blog
Inside FRASER
EconWise app – publications
FRED app
econlowdown app – mobile open educational resources
FRED Add-in for Excel
FRED API
We reach out, but we also try to be responsive to questions and comments we get from users of all our sites. If we get the same question regularly, we generally try to consider that when looking at what lessons and resources get developed next.

14. Future: Metadata enhancements for education on the fly
Standardizing subjects/topics across products
Richer, deeper related links
“Smarter” graphs
Clearer and more consistent labels
Future: Metadata enhancements for education on the fly

15. Contact me at genevieve.m.Podleski@stls.frb.org
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