By: Adina Sullivan-Marlow
NOW is the perfect to take those actions toward equity, social justice, and culturally responsive learning further. I say NOW, because right NOW there are election data graphics bombarding us from all sides. Many of those graphics are really, really bad. It isn’t because I agree or disagree with the content, but rather because the graphics themselves use poor data sources, are designed poorly, or are in some other way misleading. Those misleading data representations are used to manipulate emotions and opinions, including those that impact how students, families, and communities are seen and treated.
Here are a couple of non-political example from https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly:
These examples are pretty low-stakes. Political and financial data graphics have much larger consequences. If students are going to be able both understand the data representations they see and have the ability to create data representations that allow them to back up their own conclusions, they need data literacy. This is particularly true for students who are English-learners or are in other ways more reliant on visuals over large amounts of text.
We start teaching students about data visualizations in preschool and kindergarten. Graphs of the students with birthdays each month and how students arrived at school are some of the first ones I remember teaching in Kindergarten classes. Later in elementary we moved to line graphs and pie charts. In middle and high school the complexity continues. Students are now also taught to create infographics more and more as they have become more popular in print and digital media forms. Regardless of the grade level or subject area content, teaching students about data literacy and recognizing misleading data representations is a tangible step you can take to help students have a more equitable chance of success as citizens.
Here are some lessons resources to help you teach data literacy:
How to Help Your Students Develop Data Literacy from Edutopia has great tips and resources
Why Kids Need Data Literacy and How You Can Teach It from School Library Journal.
Data Quality Campaign has information and resources for teachers and administrators
The New York Times has interactive data visualizations on a variety of topics
Resources for understanding and practicing with misleading data representations:
Identification of Misleading Statistics from CK12
13 Graphs That Are Clearly Lying from Buzzfeed (review before use)
Misleading Graphs video from Mathhelp.com on YouTube
How Statistics Can Be Misleading from TED-Ed
How to Spot a Misleading Graph from TED-Ed