Creating Data Literate Students provides high school librarians and educators
with foundational domain knowledge to teach a new subset of information
literacy skills — data and statistical literacy, including: statistics and data comprehension; data as argument; and data visualization.
 
Data — both raw and displayed in visualizations — can clarify or confuse,
confirm or deny, persuade or deter. Students often learn that numbers are
objective, though data in the real world is rarely so. In fact, visualized data —
even from authoritative sources — can sometimes be anything but objective.
 
Librarians and classroom educators need to be as fluent with quantitative
data as they are with text in order to support high schoolers as they engage
with data in formal and informal settings. We asked contributors to this
volume — experts in high school curriculum, information literacy and/or
data literacy — to explore the intersections between data and curriculum
and identify high-impact strategies for demystifying data for educators and
students alike.
 

Knowing how to recognize the role data plays in our lives is critical to navigating today’s complex world. In this volume, you’ll find two kinds of professional development tools to support that growth. Part I contains pre-made professional development via links to webinars from the 2016 and 2017 4T Virtual Conference on Data Literacy, along with discussion questions and activities that can animate conversations around data in your school. Part II explores data “in the wild” with case studies pulled from the headlines, along with provocative discussion questions, professionals and students alike can explore multiple perspectives at play with Big Data, data privacy, personal data management, ethical data use, and citizen science.