Survey Data in Teaching Project (SDiT): Enhancing Critical Thinking and Data Literacy

Through a number of strategic investments by various funding organisations, the UK academic community has access to a unique and expansive range of digital data resources. The Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS), supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is a national data service. ESDS provides access and support for an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, spanning many disciplines and themes. It comprises a number of specialist data services that promote and encourage data usage in teaching and research. While individual datasets are used extensively in academic research, they are signifi cantly under used in learning and teaching programmes within Higher Education (HE), at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and are rarely used in Further Education (FE). As a service provider of the ESDS, the UK Data Archive (UKDA) is in a strong position to offer its data resources to the learning and teaching communities for developing materials that might be more appealing to teachers than raw data. This activity requires advice and input from instructors in the classroom on how to develop the pedagogic aspects of learning resources: which content to extract; how to contextualise and apply raw data; where to position such resources in the learning process; and on the usability and functionality of the digital resources created. This paper describes the UKDA Survey Data in Teaching project (SDiT), funded under the JISC Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme. The project’s goals were to increase the use of real data sources in the classroom, and in a more ambitious sense, to help improve the data literacy of those studying social sciences, from school students age 16-19 to postgraduates. The project created a set of free teaching and learning data and statistics-oriented resources based on the study of crime in society, and were based on learning strategies that encourage the teaching of research methods within a substantive context. This paper addresses both the positive experiences and challenges that arose from running the project.