Data literacy is an essential skill for undergraduate students in STEM, particularly those who plan to pursue a career in ecology, where visualizing and statistically analyzing data will be central to their work. While many instructors integrate data into their courses, students often receive limited instruction on how to accurately interpret data and how underlying properties of the data, such as variance, affect statistical outcomes. Data literacy may be improved if students can be actively involved in the process of analyzing data, rather than simply being presented with final analyses. We designed two short classroom interventions to assess if we could improve data literacy in a large enrollment Introductory Biology course through active data analysis. These interventions, which used real data taken from studies in ecology and evolutionary biology, focusing on two key data literacy ideas: 1) means and variance, and 2) interactions between categories in an ANOVA. For each intervention, students in the control section of the course received the final data figure that included summary statistics, while students in the treatment section generated the final data figure from raw data using DataClassroom, an educational software package designed to support data visualization and analysis. Students then answered questions about interpreting the data and reflected on how confident they were in answering these questions. Preliminary analysis of the responses suggests that, in some contexts, having students make a figure themselves can affect both the accuracy of data interpretation as well as students’ confidence in their answers. Somewhat surprisingly this effect can be either positive or negative, which suggests that building data literacy in the classroom may require careful consideration of how students work with raw data. Additional work remains to identify what aspects of active data analysis in the classroom can effectively support student learning and where the additional cognitive demands of working with data in real time can interfere with comprehension.
