Data Literacy Evolved: Thinking Differently About Your Stakeholders

Session Abstract: Who knew that building the analytic platform and tools would be the easy part? Most of us know how hard it is to get people to change their behaviors and embrace new ways of doing business! Additionally, data consumers bring with them a wide range of data understanding, skills, and literacy, presenting some of the most common and difficult challenges to providing actionable decision support across campus. It’s time for data literacy practices to evolve from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more customized approach. In this session, we will share the challenges we have encountered in identifying and supporting key stakeholders: data avoidant, data novice, data overconfident, data fluent, and data superuser. We will offer three different perspectives on how to identify these groups and support their use of data and growth in data literacy skills supported by research-based best practices. Data literacy assessment tools and support practices will be discussed and shared.

Keywords: data literacy, decision support, training, analytics, stakeholder education