Primary school pre-service teachers' ability to understand and use dashboard data and associations with their data literacy knowledge, beliefs and experience

Teacher dashboards can support instructional decision-making, but teachers often struggle to interpret dashboard data. This study examines pre-service teachers' situation-specific skills for using dashboards, including perceiving relevant data, interpreting information, and making pedagogically appropriate decisions. We investigated how these skills relate to data literacy knowledge, beliefs, and individual characteristics. 412 pre-service primary teachers completed a dashboard task, a knowledge test, and Likert-scale items to measure beliefs and experience. Results show that teachers' skills were positively correlated with data literacy knowledge and perceived value of dashboards. Furthermore, there were no statistically significant correlations between skills and either data use anxiety or self-efficacy towards data use. Second-year students and those with more mathematics-intensive secondary education performed better on the skills test, whereas experience with digital practice platforms was negatively associated with teachers' skills. Findings highlight the need to strengthen data literacy and support data-informed decision-making in teacher education.