Data Science Education — Engaging and serving multiple perspectives

This is an expertise exchange in the CIRCLS’23 Expertise Exchange session

Session Leaders: Rosta Farzan, School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh; Chad Dorsey, President & CEO, Concord Consortium

Data is everywhere in our lives and society, and embeds a lot of existing biases and assumptions. What does this mean for what we do and think? Now that data science education is emerging as a distinct discipline in K-12 learning, it is essential to think about how we best engage all perspectives and employ a critical lens across them.

This session, designed for both practitioners and researchers, will take up some of the most important questions across K-12 data science education today.

  • Who should be concerned with data science education? How can data literacy or data science education connect to or foster engagement in other topics in STEM and beyond?
  • What is data literacy? What skills are most important, and for whom?
  • How to foster critical data literacy that engages multiple perspectives?
  • How can we help ensure that data science education engages and remains useful for all stakeholders and learners?

    • This session will anchor discussion around a series of draft frameworks for critical data literacy and research-based data science learning progressions, directly engaging participants in helping contribute to and provide feedback on these emerging frameworks. Through concrete examples from ongoing work in teaching and learning, participants will consider how data science education may help contribute to or expand their work, and how they may be able to connect with and contribute to this growing field of research and pedagogy.

    Participants will receive advance access to early drafts of national frameworks, developing publications, and cutting-edge technology tools for data exploration, and will be connected to ongoing opportunities for engaging with a community of other researchers across the coming year as the frameworks develop.