What are you looking for?
- View archived sessions from the 4T Virtual Conferences on Data Literacy
- Learn about our books
- Creating Data Literate Students – essays about integrating data literacy into high school research projects
- Data Literacy in the Real World: Conversations and Case Studies – discussion guides and activities to accompany the 2016 and 2017 4T Virtual Conference on Data Literacy, plus over 45 case studies around data literacy in the real world
- Read the blog
The Supporting Librarians in Adding Data Literacy Skills to Information Literacy Instruction project is a three-year project running from October 2015 through September 2019 to develop data and statistical literacy skills in high school librarians so they can better support critical comprehension skills in their students. We define data literacy as a broad category of skills required for students to “read” and “write” with data. Our focus, therefore, is less on the mathematical aspects of data and statistics and more on the ways in which data is understood, communicated, visualized, and leveraged in decision-making. We focused our project on these six aspects of data literacy, which we selected because of their relevance to high school library environments and projects and because we hypothesized that these were the most critical for young adults as they prepared to launch into college, career, or adulthood:
- Data and statistical comprehension
- Data in and for arguments
- Data visualization
- Big Data (with citizen science as a prosocial example of pooled data)
- Personal data management
- Ethical use of data
During the first two years of the project, PI Kristin Fontichiaro and co-PI Jo Angela Oehrli partnered data experts with curriculum experts to identify mini-lessons, strategies, and “rules of thumb” that librarians can nimbly weave into their instruction. The project recognizes that librarians’ time (and that of their classroom colleagues) is limited and looks for the high-leverage practices with the greatest impact on student comprehension. In the third year, the project partnered with ICPSR to present a third and final 4T Virtual Conference on Data Literacy.
Project deliverables include:
- An online conference in Summers 2016 and 2017 (and, due to extra funding, a third conference in 2018!)
- Books with background information on data literacy, “rules of thumb,” strategies, mini-lessons, and additional resources
- A series of professional development materials, including webinars and discussion questions (woven into the books project)
If you’d like to learn more about this project, please email font [at] umich [dot] edu.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services RE-00-15-0113-15. Copyright 2015 Regents of the University of Michigan. Unless otherwise noted, materials on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
