Culturally Relevant Data in Teaching Statistics and Data Science Courses

Abstract

In this article, we consider how to make data more meaningful to students through the choice of data and the activities we use them in drawing upon students lived experiences more in the teaching of statistics and data science courses. In translating scholarship around culturally relevant pedagogy from the fields of education and mathematics education we develop the idea of culturally relevant data. We see this development as a key ingredient to implementing culturally relevant pedagogy in teaching data-intensive courses leveraging the centrality of context through data in both statistics and data science to engage students particularly from historically marginalized groups in STEM. We provide suggestions as to ways of finding or creating culturally relevant data and using them in implementing culturally relevant pedagogy to support the learning and flourishing of students in statistics and data science courses. We also present findings from pilot work we have done in implementing these data in statistics courses. Finally, we discuss lingering questions and possible next steps for research in this area. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.