Conceptions of data literacy in the statistics education literature

Data literacy is an increasingly important skill in our data-driven world, and librarians and other information professionals can play a key role in creating a data literate population due to data literacy’s close association with information literacy. However, the definition of data literacy and the attention paid to certain competencies varies greatly between fields: what librarians and statisticians mean by “data literacy” is not the same thing. A scoping review of data literacy articles within the field of statistics education reveals the landscape of data literacy education in statistics, giving librarians and other information professionals a map for coordinating their data literacy work with disciplinary faculty. The areas of data discovery, evaluating and ensuring the quality of data and its sources, and reproducibility are closely examined. These areas are defined and valued inconsistently amongst information professionals and statisticians, but their close associations to traditional library services creates an ideal opportunity for libraries and data archives to contribute to data literacy education.