The shift to quantitative research methods in social science disciplines is old news in higher education, but the relative ease of acquiring data sets via the Internet and the availability of online analysis and visualization tools have recently increased the possibilities for using data sets in the classroom. Instructors are able to teach students how data analysis works in their disciplines with a low investment in software and server space, but students need to learn how to think critically about data and statistics before they can analyze data successfully. As information literacy encompasses more than the mechanical skills to get a list of results out of an article database, data literacy is much more than copying a table into a paper or even downloading a dataset and doing a regression analysis. Data literacy is the ability to read and interpret data, to think critically about statistics, and to use statistics as evidence.
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