“Asking,Learning, Seeking Out”: An Exploration of Data Literacy for Teaching

Abstract

The current study explored preservice and inservice teachers’ perspectives on data literacy for teaching. Semi-structured interviews were employed with 12 teacher candidates in elementary and special education. The findings revealed participants’ misconceptions regarding formative and summative data; their understanding of the value of formative data; perceptions of challenges related to data literacy for teaching including time, making sense of data, and reliability and validity; and candidates’ preferences for authentic data literacy instruction.     

Two conflicting visions of education and their consilience

Over the past two decades, two heavily funded initiatives of the Federal government of Australia have been founded on two very different and seemingly conflicting (if not antithetical) visions of education. The first, the Australian Values Education Program (AVEP, 2003–2010) enshrines what may be called an ‘embedded values’ vision of education; the second, the National Assessments Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN, 2008-present) enshrines a ‘performative’ vision. The purpose of this article is to unpack these two seemingly conflicting visions and to argue instead for their possible consilience, bringing together apparently incompatible phenomena to coalesce into a single, more expansive vision of schooling. Against the historical context that gave rise to AVEP and NAPLAN in Australia, the article argues that the visions of education rendered in these abrupt policy shifts are vestiges of a history of dichotomous and dualistic thinking in western educational philosophy. Underpinning this dualism is a fundamental schism between cognition and emotion and a Cartesian separation of mind from body that can no longer be sustained. Our increased understanding of the neural substrates of cognition, the ‘intertwined’ nature of cognition and emotion, combined with a philosophy of mind that does not dissociate propositional knowledge from the disposition of the learner, points to an alternative vision of education. A vision that is thoroughly values embedded, concerned with the educational wellbeing of each child, while also giving value to and prioritising educational performance and achievement, and the intellectual liberation these can offer each and every child.     

Linking Class and Gender Inequality: the family and schooling

Some feminists have argued that a woman's class position should be determined by her own employment and work history, whereas Goldthorpe has argued that the family is the basic unit in class analysis, with the husband's occupation determining the class position of all family members, including the wife's. Goldthorpe denies that this position is an example of gender bias, claiming that class and gender inequality are separate issues. This paper argues that gender and class inequality are strongly interconnected, by virtue of the importance of the work in child‐rearing carried out by the wife‐mother and its effects on the child's scholastic achievements and life chances. It shows that within‐family processes are more important than class position in affecting children's scholastic achievements. It further argues that children's family environments are affected by the biographies of both parents. The institutional separation of the family, schooling and the work‐place means that there will be great variability in the biographies of parents who are in the same ‘class position’ by virtue of their occupations. The notion of a single indicator of ‘class position’ therefore seems inappropriate, and too static for the complex institutional relationships involved.