Developing Data Analytics in K-12 education as a tool for promoting Equity and social justice worldwide

Abstract

This paper presents an educative proposal for teaching and learning data analytics (DA) in primary education. The overall objective of this research is to make students capable to solve real world problems through data-drive decisions. A total of 114 students, aged 9-11, participated in this study. Students solved in small groups a social challenge related how weather affects our emotions. During the project, students developed key DA (i.e. define problem, explore and analyze data, draw conclusions and make decisions) and they learned to draw evidence-based conclusions to the question How does weather affect us? A pre-post knowledge test was used to evaluate students’ improvement on DA. Our findings show significant improvement on students’ DA learning. Furthermore, the findings show that the educative intervention had a positive impact on students’ statistical literacy and on students’ DA competences. Students showed a greater improvement on the capacity to formulate key questions to research about a social problem, better understanding of data models and draw data-based conclusions. We can conclude that the educative intervention developed key students’ DA skills for explaining and understanding social problems. Indeed, these competences will lead our students to take evidence-based decisions in order to construct a more egalitarian and social justice world. Future educational implications to design a more effective DA pedagogy are also discussed.