Diving into data: Developing the capacity for data literacy in teacher education

Karen Dunlap,Jody S Piro,Shuyan Wang

doi:10.1080/2331186x.2015.1132526

Abstract

AbstractEducators by definition are now required to utilize a variety of student data to shape the decisions they make and design the lessons they teach. As accountability standards become more stringent and as teachers face increasingly diverse student populations within their classrooms, they often struggle to adequately meet the needs of all learners. Using student data, rationales for instructional decisions become grounded in best practices. Unfortunately, some administrators and teachers lack the confidence and/or training needed to successfully engage with and interpret data results. This may be especially true for early career educators and those just entering the field. Indeed, for novice teachers to be successful in the current accountability culture, they must possess, understand, and effectively utilize data literacy skills, something quite difficult to accomplish without adequate training. The research in this article explored how pre-service educators determined what worked in a data literac...

Highlights

One pedagogical challenge of the twenty-first century is the continually changing data literacy landscape that currently exists in today’s society
Pre-intervention beliefs Participants unanimously stated their discomfort with understanding data prior to the Data Chat
In teacher education data literacy intervention research, Reeves and Honig (2015) found moderately higher self-efficacy results after an in-course data literacy intervention. The implications from these and previous research suggest that providing opportunities for pre-service teacher candidates to work with varying data literacy behaviors during their teacher preparation program may result in more self-efficacy with data use in teacher’s professional contexts

Summary

Introduction

One pedagogical challenge of the twenty-first century is the continually changing data literacy landscape that currently exists in today’s society. The authors’ current research agendas have focused on accountability measures for teacher educators and administrators. This current article reflects an ongoing research project aimed at understanding how to implement data literacy in teacher and administrator preparation programs. The purpose of this research was to explore a data literacy intervention embedded in a pre-service teacher education instruction and assessment course from the perspectives of the participants. We studied our own instructional intervention to better understand how the participants were experiencing data literacy instruction in a pre-service teacher education course and how their experiences could structure and inform future instructional choices. The results from the qualitative study suggested that pre-service teacher used a data literacy intervention to assist them comprehend and analyze data and to use it for instructional purposes

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