Data for Healthy Communities: A Public Interest Pilot Curriculum to Develop K-12 Data Literacy

Abstract: Data analytics skills are in high demand in a wide variety of professions and data is increasingly present in our everyday lives. Considering this, educators should be equipped to prepare future data scientists, but also data literate citizens. Data for Healthy Communities is a 3-week high school enrichment course which provides students the opportunity to engage with the real-world practice of data analytics within the context of public health. A key challenge in introducing data skills in K-12 is addressing barriers to access. To cope with these barriers, the course design incorporates the use of spreadsheets to engage students in computational thinking. This talk will review the design and development of the curriculum and the evaluation plan. The hope is that providing this curriculum as an Open Educational Resource will enable high school teachers across the curriculum to introduce data-driven approaches in a wide variety of classes to address complex societal challenges.

Bio: Dr. Emily Nutwell is the Program Director of the Masters in Translational Data Analytics at The Ohio State University, an in-career program serving working professionals in diverse fields. She leverages her 20 years of engineering workplace experience and her more recent work in higher education to lead the program which serves these nontraditional adult learners. Dr. Nutwell developed and currently teaches the 2-semester capstone course sequence where she works with students and project sponsors in the development and execution of real-world data projects.  As part of the Translational Data Analytics Institute, she is involved in several education and outreach projects including the Data Science Summer Camp for middle school students. She is a 2022 Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge Grantee. This project focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of a pilot curriculum for high school students which aims to introduce students to the practice of data analytics in the context of public health.