Date of Award

Spring 5-3-2024

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master's of Science in Teaching (MST)

Department

Teaching

Advisor

Franziska Peterson

Second Committee Member

Sara Lindsay

Third Committee Member

Heather Falconer

Abstract

Data literacy is becoming an increasingly necessary skill, especially in the sciences. In recent years, more and more schools are including data literacy education in their K-12 curricula, particularly at the secondary level. To successfully implement such classroom projects, teachers must have the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to help students build their data literacy skills. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of data literacy, teachers are required to obtain knowledge outside their normal subject expertise. Data literacy focused interdisciplinary professional development can help teachers obtain the instructional skills necessary to help their students become data literate. Before teacher educators can design effective data literacy professional development programs, they must understand what preconceptions teachers maintain about data literacy and related concepts. At the start of a research practice partnership between a University in the Northeast, a rural school district, and the surrounding community, seven teachers were interviewed about their perceptions of data literacy, authentic context, and quantitative reasoning. The teachers were predominantly high school science teachers, but included one middle school science teacher and one high school social studies teacher. Analysis of the interviews indicates ii that teachers had robust conceptions of data literacy and authentic context, but not quantitative reasoning. Teacher descriptions of authentic context strongly informed their descriptions of data literacy, unlike quantitative reasoning which teachers described as a largely separate concept. When compared to academic definitions, the teacher descriptions taken together included almost all of the academic definition themes. As a whole, the results from this study lay the groundwork for future research in interdisciplinary data literacy professional development creation. Future research may also include a study of how teacher perceptions of the data literacy concepts change over the course of the research practice partnership.

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