Toward data-scientific thinking

Abstract

The growth of the data culture has led to calls for improving data literacy among primary and secondary students and their teachers. One approach to improving data literacy is to teach a course devoted to data science but, given the lack of consensus over the term “data science,” just what should an introductory data science course include? The author argues that at the secondary level, an introductory data science course should strive to teach data-scientific thinking, which has statistical thinking at its core, blended with some computational thinking, and with a dash of mathematics.