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Data Literacy Teaching Toolkit

Instructional activities and resources for faculty who wish to teach data literacy skills and integrate data-related learning objectives into their courses.

Data Literacy Competencies with Disciplinary Scaffolding 2.0

Cross-institutional research was conducted by librarians from Rollins College and USF's St. Petersburg campus to affirm the data-related competencies that are critical for undergraduate students.

Preliminary research results indicated a need for refining the scaffolding to better reflect differences across disciplines, as shown in the table below. These revised undergraduate data literacy competencies may be used as a guide to help faculty and librarians integrate data-related skills into undergraduate courses in a variety of disciplines (Burress, Mann, Montgomery, & Walton, 2021 forthcoming). 

Research to affirm and apply these competencies is ongoing.

Burress, T., Mann, E., Montgomery, S., & Walton, R. (2021, forthcoming). Data literacy in undergraduate education: Faculty perspectives and pedagogical approaches. In Teaching Critical Thinking with Numbers. American Library Association.

Data Literacy Competencies for Higher Education 1.0

A 2018-2019 Faculty Learning Community identified key data-related competencies that are critical for college students as shown in the chart below. These competencies may be used as a guide to help faculty across disciplines integrate data-related skills into their courses (Burress, Mann, and Neville, 2020). Because data analysis is a core competency often covered in courses, we focused on the following complementary areas:

* Our Faculty Learning Community found that activities allowing students to create original datasets that are meaningful to them personally are an effective way to help them understand how data is created, thereby improving their ability to interpret and critically evaluate external datasets and data visualizations.

Burress, T., Mann, E., & Neville, T. (2020). Exploring data literacy via a librarian-faculty learning community: A case study. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(1), 102076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102076