Motivation
Digital literacy is commonly recognized as essential for today’s and our future societies. The digital literacy strategy of the European Union announced and introduced “Strengthening Skills Intelligence” and “Increasing STEM graduates, fostering entrepreneurial and transversal skills” as two of the twelve actions in the skills revolution that is needed “to ensure people can thrive in the green and digital transitions, and to help in the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic”. Data literacy is closely related to and dependent on other informatics skills and competencies, especially digital literacy.
The European Commission outlined ten key areas for Informatics in primary education:
- Data and information
- Algorithms
- Programming
- Computing systems
- Networks
- People–system interface
- Design and development
- Modelling and simulation
- Awareness and empowerment
- Safety and security.
However, there’s limited research on data/information education for lower primary school levels (grades 1-4, ages 6-10). Only Poland addresses this level, leaving out 6- to 10-year-olds from data education in other countries. Lessons from scarce research on higher primary school levels (grade 5 and up) suggest caution in directly applying methods from higher education to younger children. The (geo)spatial data domain is one area that has developed learning outcomes for lower primary school levels.
The DIRECTORS project aims to implement, test, and evaluate an educational approach for teaching data to primary school children, aligning with the EU’s future data literacy needs.
Objectives
The DIRECTORS project has the objective to:
- develop, implement and evaluate a new teaching approach to advance the (open) data literacy of ISCED level 1 pupils (pupils).
- develop, implement and evaluate innovative quality teaching material and Open Educational Resources (OER) to support teachers in teaching (open) data literacy at the ISCED level 1.
The project focuses on primary education, which is education classified in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Level 1. This type of education typically starts at the age of 5-7 years and lasts six years.
Outcomes
The outcomes of the project are:
- New learning, teaching and training materials and methodologies supporting updating current primary school curricula on data/information education.
- Increased digital/data personal and professional competencies of teachers at ISCED level 1 in Europe/Croatia/the Netherlands.
Partners
Delft University of Technolgy
University of Zagreb Faculty of Geodesy
University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing