Preliminary Results from the Thinking With Data Project: A Cross-Curricular Approach to the Development of Data Literacy

Data literacy is recognized as a critically important skill in today’s society. While data literacy skills are included in disciplinary standards across the curriculum, they remain focused on de-contextualized data manipulation in Mathematics and are reduced to reading charts and graphs in most other subject areas. Nowhere is thinking with and about data really addressed. The Thinking with Data (TWD) project takes seriously the notion that data literacy is neither a single discipline nor a sub-discipline of Mathematics, but rather a skill that should be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner. This paper discusses what it means to address data literacy across the curriculum and shares the results of the field implementation of the TWD curriculum in two middle schools in Northeast Ohio.

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