Data Literacy

Before this week's assignment, I had never heard of data literacy. According to an article by Mac Bryla, data literacy is, "The ability to derive meaningful information from data...". What we don't realize is that we need this skill to do simple daily tasks... like understand a weather forecast.

In our rotating chair, our class agreed that data literacy is important for all fields. This is due to data literacy being necessary to complete or understand day to day tasks. Being able to understand what numbers are representing is a life skill in today's world. Due to this fact, we all believe it is important to teach this skill in our classrooms.

Makenna asked us all how we planned to incorporate data literacy into our class or if we even would. Being a science teacher means I will have to include data literacy in my lessons. Most of science is performing experiments and attaining data that will describe the effect/outcome of that experiment. In order to do so, students will need to know what the test is doing, how we are measuring it, what the data that comes out of it is representing, and what that result means. Each test performed, type of data received, and result is another lesson in data literacy. My class will teach students how to read scientific data, and be able to relate this data to their knowledge in science.

Why would understanding scientific data be important for all students to learn? Well, this pandemic is a fantastic example. If we were all well educated in reading and interpreting data, we would be able to see that this illness, while chronic, is not the leading killer in our country. We would understand that this is another strain of the flu, and the research on the virus itself would be significant to all Americans, not just those in the field of science and health.

As I said earlier, data literacy is not something meaningless that kids are being taught in high school and never using again. It is a skill like reading and writing, that will constantly be in use in their everyday lives.