Think back with me to the first time you went to school or when you first formally learning.
Maybe you’re sounding out the letters of the alphabet, forming your name, or even counting
to 10.
For many of us, literacy, which classically meant the ability to read, write, and count,
is where our thirst for knowledge all started.
But we need so much more to navigate the modern world.
Communication is fast.
Need a book right this second?
There’s an e-book for that.
Can’t wait a couple days for a letter to arrive?
Hail to the email.
But this immediate information transfer puts pressure on how fast we can interpret it all.
It’s a race to keep up.
So the traditional three R’s of reading, writing, and ar-ithmetic have gotten an upgrade
in the 21st century.
We’re now wielding a Swiss army knife of literacies from traditional literacy to digital
literacy, media literacy, and (of course our favorite:) data literacy.
Becoming data literate has helped us stay on top of the data that crosses our path,
but data literacy isn’t a standalone skill.
It interacts with and complements literacies we build through other means in our quest
to understand and engage with our world.
I’m Jessica Pucci and welcome to Study Hall Data Literacy presented by Arizona State University
and Crash Course.
There’s a reason that literacy is such a fundamental part of our education and usually
starts when we’re very young.
Literacy is crucial to our ability to communicate with one another.
We used to only talk about literacy when learning about typical “humanities” courses like
literature and history.
And we were mainly focused on reading and writing traditional printed materials like
books and the local newspaper.
But now we communicate in even more ways than ever, and to keep up, the notion of literacy
has expanded.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO for short,
rebranded literacy in 2005
as the "ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed
and written materials associated with varying contexts.”
We have to interpret and synthesize all kinds — and frankly just more — materials:
data and graphs, endless online sources, definitive books and real time opinions, even YouTube videos!
With all of the tools at our disposal (shoutout to spreadsheets), it’s easy to get overwhelmed
by thinking we have to master each.
But realistically our goal should be basic fluency.
Fortunately, we don’t have to tackle just one literacy at a time.
When working through information, we bounce between literacies to get the full picture
of a source.
Traditional literacy, or reading, writing, and working with numbers, is just the start.
Like, take our ability to understand the role that money plays in our society.
Financial literacy comes in handy when we’re inspecting recent stock trends and deciding
what that means for our portfolio.
Hey, it’s never too early to plan for retirement!
We’re not just using our knowledge of money markets.
Being able to crunch the numbers ourselves and read graphs of stock prices over time
relies on other literacies:
our ability to read, analyze, create, and talk about data which is data literacy and
our visual literacy,
or how we interpret and take meaning from what we see, like in images.
Or what about our ability to navigate information that comes from journalists or commercials
or art or any other form of communication but is published online.
Media literacy is basically our ability to access and interpret all forms of communication,
and digital literacy combines the skills we use to wander and learn on the internet and
actually use a computer or smart device.
And we use them both when we engage with that news article a friend posts on our social
media profile.
Let’s see all of these literacies in action in the Data Point.
If someone was sitting behind us watching as we scrolled through a news article, they
might be a bit confused.
We think we process an article start to finish, but we might actually bop around, switching
between literacies at a rapid pace.
There’s no right order for wielding literacies.
Sometimes it just depends on what catches our eye first.
Sure that barchart in this news article is halfway down the page, but it sticks out.
So we may skip the introduction and jump down.
It’s a little overwhelming at first with a bunch of colors and labels, so we scan the
legend (ah red means “before change” and blue means “after change”)
and read the caption to better orient us to what we are looking at.
Ok, each bar represents reported mood scores per age group.
I guess this article is about mood.
Visual literacy helps us translate the chart’s components into a message about mood scores.
Data literacy also helps us recognize the quantitative differences across age groups
and before and after a change.
Or maybe we came across the article in the first place because this graph and headline
were shared on social media, and we clicked through to get more details.
Our digital literacy helped us literally navigate to the information in its screen form, but
our data literacy chips in to make us wary of the claim.
A cause and effect is much harder to show than a correlation.
After looking at the plot (again, thanks visual literacy) we are primed for what this story
is about.
Green space good, old park bad, got it.
But now we have even more questions than we did when we started.
Where did this data come from?
How was it analyzed?
Why?
Data literacy engages our skepticism and sends us back to the beginning of the text to search
for some context.
As we keep reading, the story links to other related stories about park improvements.
Our media literacy has us curious to read more on this particular topic, so we’ll
have to decide whether we finish the story or click through to new viewpoints.
Well, we get the gist of this particular story now, but we want to know more about this other
park, so *click* down the rabbit hole we go!
As we waded through information online in the Data Point, we used multiple literacies.
We read, we examined a plot, we clicked through a link.
That link could have led us to a video we watched.
We may have even done a little writing in the comments section.
With so many interconnected literacies to juggle, we may worry that less experience
in any of these forms will kick off a domino effect of misunderstanding.
And to some extent it’s true that misinformation has more opportunities to reach us in all
of its forms:
every photo, video, sound byte, media article, and even scientific study has the potential
to lead us astray.
Our decision making process is actually an algorithm of sorts, or list of instructions
we feed information into.
And thinking about our last episode and our discussion of when algorithms give inaccurate
predictions or reflect hidden biases in society,
we know that “garbage in” leads to “garbage out.”
We face the same problem when we ingest a bunch of information flying at us from all sides.
Except now it’s our job to filter out bad inputs ourselves, with the help of all our literacies.
We might mistakenly trust a company with our private data who then loses it to a malicious
hacker, forcing us to change all our credit cards.
We might spend our hard-earned money on a wellness product that isn’t actually effective.
Or we might even support a political candidate who doesn’t act in our best interest once
in power.
Growing our digital, financial, or data literacies through courses like Study Hall,
or even just by giving ourselves more time to read and process information before making
decisions, can help us avoid this literacy nightmare.
And we should keep growing our literacies, because these sub-optimal decisions at the
individual level can really add up and affect major societal decisions.
When things backfire, a general sense of mistrust takes over.
Data breaches make us less willing to share information.
Failed wellness products make us more skeptical of health findings that may actually really
help us.
And political candidates going rogue can wreak havoc on the governmental institutions we
rely on.
Just as literacies are interconnected, our literacy skills affect others.
We all have a responsibility to society to keep up on our literacies.
But no pressure, right?
The good news is that interconnectedness can also help us.
Like if we miss something with one of our literacies, we can make up for it with another one.
And since data is everywhere, our work to strengthen our data literacy is one of the
best literacy moves we can make.
Say we hear about a drug trial on the news and we passively accept that it’s a success story.
But then later in the week we’re reading a newspaper article about the same topic,
and it includes a chart that makes us rethink the finding.
It just takes one little detail to set off one of our literacy senses and cause us to
dig in further.
And by the time we track down the original study and investigate further, we’re on
a roll.
And while we’re at it, we might want to bring others along for the ride.
Teaching a friend or family member about the various literacy tips we’ve picked up can
help solidify our own understanding.
When we’re resharing a post, we could comment on what we did and didn’t find convincing
in the cover story and explain our reasoning.
Maybe someone’s response will spark another idea and keep the conversation going.
Remember, literacy is all about communication, and data often provides a common thread in
the stories we hear or tell.
Just as reading, writing, and arithmetic have been essential literacies throughout history,
data literacy is now here to stay.
It’s not just statisticians and data scientists who need to be able to understand data.
We the people do too.
And with more places to get information, we need even more navigation skills.
Specialized tool literacies like the art of crafting a search engine query and sniffing
out unreliable parts of Wikipedia pages are ones we rely on daily.
As new ways of communicating continue to pop up, our set of “core” literacies will
keep expanding.
Tik-Tok literacy anyone?
We may laugh now, but it actually doesn’t seem so far fetched that social media literacy
will evolve from both digital and media literacy as we understand them now.
And isn’t the language of emojis basically visual literacy?
There’s always something to learn; new year, new literacy.
And data literacy will continue being essential as our decisions — in business, life, maybe
even love?
— become even more data-driven.
Today we learned how data literacy fits in with all of the other literacies to help us
understand our world.
Each literacy contributes to how we make decisions, and that interconnectedness can both help
and hurt us at times.
Next time we’ll help you find your own data to answer questions you have, address issues
that matter to you, and settle any nerdy debates amongst your friends.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Data Literacy, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course in the links in the description.
See you next time!