CHANGING 2YC STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS AND DATA LITERACY USING OOI DATA

Understanding and working with data is one of the most increasingly critical in-demand career skills in the modern workforce and is no longer limited to STEM careers. The ability to read, understand, interpret, and communicate data effectively has become as essential as reading, writing and math. However, students enter Community Colleges (2YCs) have varying backgrounds and often represent under-prepared student populations in skill sets and confidence in language, math, science questioning, critical thinking, data analysis, and the ability to synthesize or apply concepts. Introductory general education students mostly fall into categories of data avoiders or data novices, and rarely have skills expected by employers. In fact, students may never have been introduced to non-idealized data sets which have outliers, gaps, messy trends or visualizations that are discipline specific. Students new to working with complex data need to be guided through structured methods of examining and making sense of the data. Our study evaluated 2YC online introductory oceanography students’ change in perceptions and understanding of authentic ‘big data’ visualizations. We used large Ocean Observatories data sets from the Ocean Data Lab Manual: Building Data Skills activity that uses a scaffolded learning cycle approach where data literacy skills and scientific concepts are incrementally introduced within the activity.  The activity meets students’ needs by placing information into relevant contexts, self-checking knowledge throughout the activity and promotes self-directed discovery in an effort to transform students from data avoiders into more confident data interpreters that can read, interpret, and critically evaluate data from different data visualizations and increase their data literacy.

Presentation Preference: Oral

Primary Presenter: Denise Bristol, Hillsborough Community College - SouthShore (dbristol@hccfl.edu)

Authors:

Denise Bristol, Hillsborough Community College - SouthShore Campus  (dbristol@hccfl.edu)

Anna Pfeiffer-Herbert, Stockton University  (anna.pfeiffer-herbert@stockton.edu)

Jessica Olney, Hillsborough Community College - Ybor Campus  (jolney2@hccfl.edu)