Developing Data Literacy with Adolescents: Supporting Youth as Authors, Architects, and Interpreters of Data

Amy Stornaiuolo

This study explores how young people develop data literacy, the capacity to build and communicate meaning through representations of information. While data literacy has emerged as a crucial digital literacy skill in our networked culture, it has not been widely studied in educational research, particularly the challenge of supporting young people in using data to create actionable knowledge. Through a yearlong ethnographic investigation into how students develop data literacy in a technology-infused and design-oriented high school, the study will highlight the literacy dimensions of data literacy, drawing particular attention to the historical, cultural, social, and political dimensions of how data is used to produce and value knowledge. It will trace how students use data for different purposes – to generate knowledge, to craft alternative narratives challenging mainstream discourses, to interrogate what counts as data, or to turn data toward civic action. A major contribution of the research project is its focus on developing the data literacy construct based on youth perspectives.

About Amy Stornaiuolo

Amy Stornaiuolo is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines adolescents’ multimodal composing practices, teachers’ educational uses of digital technologies, and relationships between authors and audiences in online, networked spaces. All of her work centers on how to create equitable and accessible learning opportunities for young people by examining how youth draw on diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires as they participate in richly literate lives across multiple social contexts—and the role teachers and mentors play in these practices. Dr. Stornaiuolo is currently the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation project studying how adolescents produce and use data visualizations to guide their composing and revision processes in an online writing community. She has received a number of awards for her research and has published her work in journals like Harvard Educational Review, Review of Research in Education, and the Journal of Literacy Research. She is co-editor the forthcoming Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures (Routledge, 2017). Dr. Stornaiuolo received her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture from the University of California, Berkeley.