About Defining and Developing Data Literacy

Deanna Kuhn introduces this discussion in her contribution, Defining and Developing Data Literacy, making several strong claims. First, adolescents, and even many adults, do not demonstrate data literacy skills where they matter most – recognizing the data that would be needed to substantiate a controversial claim. Second, as valuable as new electronic platforms may be in viewing data in varying transformable formats, they can be at most a beginning tool in a developmental progression toward data literacy that needs to be more fully identified. Finally, students bring to new data a rich store of their own ideas and the multiple narratives into which these data might be assembled. Very simple data displays may provide young students all the complexity they need to address the initial conceptual challenges awaiting them as they undertake to coordinate their ideas with data that bear on them.

We invite researchers to respond to Deanna’s piece with their own ideas, including their own original research. Contributions are welcome to take the form of research articles, data notes, reviews, policy briefs, opinion pieces, and any other article types.

Keywords: computer-assisted learning, mathematical reasoning, scientific reasoning,  argument, explanation, inference, theory-evidence coordination, learning progressions, problem-based learning, data literacy

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