Innovation Pathways for Data Careers (IPDC)

Challenge

Data is an ever-growing resource that businesses—across diverse industries—use to create, innovate, and improve business practices by better understanding customer bases, creating personalized marketing, tracking conditions, and predicting trends. How do we prepare our students for these data-centric workforce opportunities?

The Innovation Pathways for Data Careers (IPDC) project is a research-practice partnership designed to develop and test a new Innovation Pathway for Massachusetts. IPDC is guiding Massachusetts high school students in accessing, participating in, and successfully completing data-rich courses that culminate in meaningful postsecondary and workforce credentials. It is also providing school leaders with research findings to inform the development of successful new Innovation Pathways.

Key Activities

The project is carrying out the following activities:

Develop a research-practice partnership among stakeholders from three school districts to explore what it takes to implement successful Innovation Pathways
Develop a guidebook to help high school teachers work with students to create data-rich civics projects
Develop and pilot courses in data visualization and Python+Data leading to postsecondary data programs
Provide Massachusetts educators from five school districts with professional development focused on data fluency, data visualization, and Python+Data

Impact

The IPDC project will:

Provide a template for high schools across the country to interest, engage, and help students persist in developing data science skills
Identify elements that lead to the successful implementation of the Massachusetts Innovation Pathways model
Build the capacity of over 70 Massachusetts educators to integrate data-rich projects into civics curricula and/or to teach data-centric courses