Who Communicates Well with Data: Examining Data Literacy among Pre‐service Secondary Teachers

Abstract

The current study developed a data literacy instrument with 20 contextual questions and conducted a multi‐mode survey with 232 pre‐service secondary teachers in a university system. Three‐way ANOVA was used to test whether pre‐service teachers with different characteristics (i.e., field of study, library use, and Internet use) performed differently on data literacy. Pre‐service teachers got a decent overall percentage score. They performed better in “identifying problems” and “analyzing data” than in “transforming data” and “collecting data.” While pre‐service teachers in humanities and social sciences performed better in “identifying problems,” those in sciences performed better in “analyzing data.” Humanities pre‐service teachers with high Internet use scored significantly lower; social science pre‐service teachers with high Internet use and low library use scored significantly lower; science pre‐service teachers with low library use scored higher. Implications for future data literacy education and instrument design are discussed based on the preliminary findings.