Open Data in Education: Fostering Data Literacy Among High-school Learners

Abstract The huge and ever-increasing amount of publicly available data is shaping the data-driven society that citizens are encouraged to tame. It requires future generations, i.e., current learners, to acquire data literacy skills to make informed decisions. Towards this direction, we present a data literacy workshop involving more than $$\varvec{150}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>150</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> high school learners focused on co-creating Open Data via a digital environment and authoring data stories while evaluating their engagement and learning. Results show that participants are, on average, engaged during the in-person stages of the workshops, independently by gender, and they are mainly interested in collaborative activities, hands-on, and public presentations. This experiment confirm that learning is positively correlated with engagement, which aligns with the literature. However, further efforts should be invested in letting learners master data literacy skills while increasing their interest.