Data is all around us, is only increasing, and the ability to understand, use it, and communicate has become a valuable asset to have. One can say that it has actually become just as important as reading and writing. I recently came across a video showing how one mother was helping her kids collect, analyze and communicate using data and I found it so interesting, to see how we as parents could support our kids to think about data and with data at an early age. At work and in my field of data analysis, I and colleagues often talk about the benefits of data-driven decision making, creating data cultures and strategies, and empowering employees with data. It has been researched and found that employees who are for instance able to use data, are more successful in their work. With all this, I thus wondered why we don’t hear much about data literacy and data-driven decision making in our personal lives, and how data literacy could empower us to make more informed decisions. In particular, I wondered how I could already support my three year old child to be on a path where she becomes data literate and gets to reap the benefits that come with it such as; increased curiosity (ability to ask questions and seek answers), increased experimentation and exploration; empowered to make decisions, and increase in logical reasoning. Another benefit I also see is that parents will trust their kids to make more informed decisions.
Just like any skill, being data literate can be developed through practice. Children like adults are collecting, observing, and measuring information in their own way, and we can support them in being aware of it, how to use it and communicate with it. In this post, I wanted to share something small I started doing with my daughter to start the process and hopefully I will continue sharing more examples and results.
My little girl, probably like many three year old girls out there, likes dresses, particularly those that make her feel like a ballerina. The first exercise we did as with any data project was data collection. I took her dresses and laid them out so that she could take pictures of them. She likes to take pictures nowadays and is actually not bad at it either. I uploaded the pictures to a blank PowerPoint slide and we started exploring the dresses. I asked her questions and she responded based on what she could see.
The questions I asked her included asking her to point out the order in which she liked the dresses. This was not an easy one when she had many dresses on one slide, but when I reduced them to just three, she was able to say her favorite, second favorite, and least. This is a simple sorting methodology she is learning through this exercise.
Another exercise we did involved learning to group similar objects together. As she is now learning her left from right, another question was asking her to put the dresses that had pink in them to one side and those that didn’t to another and counting the number in each side, or ones that had long sleeves together, medium sleeves in another group, and no sleeves in another and counting how big each group was. Through this she learns techniques of grouping and classification.
We didn’t manage to go through all that I had planned as she found something more interesting to do but we will definitely continue. My plan is to expand this and include clothes of different seasons and connect the clothes to the temperature outside. In this way, I hope that when we check the weather in the morning and we see that it feels like it’s -10, she will be able to realize which clothes to put on by herself, connecting different data points to make an informed decision.
The above is a simple exercise one that could even have been done with just the dresses themselves, i.e. no need to take pictures. But it was interesting to see that just from the interaction, the questions, she was realizing the similarities and differences she had in her dresses which she might have known but at least had not communicated. Now when she asks for a dress, she is able to say whether she is looking for a short or long sleeved dress, aspects of the dress she was not using before.
And I believe as we continue these exercises, her reasoning of things, her communication of things will improve, just as we see of employees in companies where data literacy is encouraged.
If you get to try this with your children, do let me know 🙂