Building Data Literacy through the Arts

Challenge

Some efforts to promote data literacy focus solely on mathematics or science content. Yet rigorous, interdisciplinary approaches to teaching data science also have the potential to build students’ data skills, spark interest in data science, and support them in analyzing data.

In this collaborative research project, EDC, New York University, and Fordham University co-designed and studied an approach to integrating art and mathematics to promote middle school students’ data literacy learning.

Key Activities

The project team carried out the following activities:

• Collaborated with 10 art teachers and mathematics teachers from four schools across three states to co-design, test, and refine four curriculum units for middle school classrooms
• Conducted research on how to equip teachers to develop art-based approaches to data literacy instruction
• Disseminated project materials, including pedagogical approaches, toolkits, and adaptable classroom activities

Impact

• The team produced four interdisciplinary curriculum units teaching data literacy through dance, comics, photography, and collage.
• The team’s research advanced knowledge of how to support the effective co-design of data literacy units among art teachers, mathematics teachers, and researchers; how teachers used materials in their classrooms to engage students in data literacy; and how an art-based approach supported students’ engagement with data literacy.
• The team published their findings in the British Journal of Educational Technology, Information and Learning Sciences, and the Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference led by the Association for Computing Machinery