Providing Community Support Through Data Literacy: U-SLED
A team led by Dr. Michelle Friend, Dept of Teacher Education, College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, along with Dr. Becky Brusky (Mathematics, A&S), Dr. Julie Dierberger (Service Learning Academy), Dr. Mahbubul Majumber (Mathematics, A&S), and Dr. Betty Love (Mathematics, A&S) will implement a study on STAT1100, the general education mathematics course that incorporates community engagement to teach students data literacy.
The Undergraduate Service Learning Experiences with Data: Mathematics in the Community (U-SLED; NSF #2021512) is a new interdisciplinary project that uses community engagement to improve undergraduate mathematics education. This project builds upon the success of a prior NSF grant that created MATH1120: Mathematical and Computational Thinking, and led to innovation in approaches to general education mathematics at UNO.
U-SLED will implement and research a new course, STAT 1100: Data Literacy and Visualization. Students will learn data analysis and visualization by working with non-profit organizations. Students will use data to answer authentic questions for these community partners, strengthening partners’ organizational capacity to meet their missions while preparing students with critical workforce skills such as data literacy and collaboration. For example, Wellbeing Partners is a local non-profit working to eliminate health disparities who wants to understand relationships between demographic variables (e.g., family size, income, education rates) and how often families run out of food each month. A student group will use U.S. census data and data on food deserts to analyze and visualize these relationships such as in the image below.
This unique approach to general education mathematics is expected to increase students’ confidence and interest in mathematics and STEM careers, engage students in the local community, and serve as a model across the U.S.
