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You are swimming in an ocean of data and don’t even realize it. All around you are invisible amounts of data that would be staggering to try to comprehend. Thousands of smartphones and smart devices are talking to, sending and downloading vast amounts of data, video, audio, words, numbers, images, you name it. Everything from the latest movie on Netflix to someone’s radiology results from a cancer screening.
And yet you can’t see it, hear it or feel it. This is a perfect metaphor for the way in which our educational institutions approach data literacy. Because data is so ubiquitous, it’s simply taken for granted at best or totally ignored at worst. As a society, we do this at our own risk.
Individuals and organizations use data and an exploding number of platforms to influence us, from the news to marketing to politics and health care policy. Particularly on social media, and with the pervasive use of generative artificial intelligence, it has become increasingly more difficult to easily distinguish between fact, opinion and false statements.
We also live in a politically charged and highly polarized environment, which has led to more interest in teaching civics in K-12 education. A 2021 “Educating for American Democracy Report” of more than 300 educational experts states: “In recent decades, we as a nation have failed to prepare young Americans for self-government, leaving the world’s oldest constitutional democracy in grave danger, afflicted by both cynicism and nostalgia, as it approaches its 250th anniversary. The time has come to recommit to the education of our young people for informed, authentic and engaged citizenship.”
In the process, the report exposed two distinct problems with no small degree of overlap. We need the next generation to understand how a democracy should function, and we need for them to more fully appreciate the role data, technology, and data literacy should play in helping that democracy to function.
In his recent book, “The Bill of Obligations, The Ten Habits of Good Citizens,” Richard Haass, president emeritus of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, states, “We need nothing less than a ‘Bill of Obligations’ to guide how we teach, understand, and conduct our politics.” Haass elaborates on 10 obligations he believes we must embody to be good citizens. Not surprisingly, the first obligation is “Be Informed.” In addition to being informed about how the government operates and history, a good citizen must be informed about the issues currently facing the country. With the ease with which misinformation can be created and disseminated, it seems unlikely that regulation or censorship is going to mitigate the spread of misinformation to make the task of being an informed citizen any easier. We believe a more promising approach is to educate citizens on how to separate fact from opinion or misinformation.
We are beginning to see governments and educational institutions take notice of the misinformation problem and try to combat it through education. Indeed, as early as 2014, Finland began adopting media literacy programs into their schools’ curriculum with the goal of teaching children how to evaluate truth versus misinformation and information from online sources. In January 2023, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to pass legislation to require K-12 students to be taught how to combat misinformation. The bill requires at a minimum, instruction on the research process and how information is created and produced; critical thinking and using information resources; research methods, including the difference between primary and secondary sources; the difference between facts, points of view and opinions; accessing peer-reviewed print and digital library resources; and the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information.
This is a great start, but we recommend adding a dose of data literacy to civics education. Data literacy equips individuals with the skills to critically evaluate and interpret data. Skills such as how to question the source of the data, understanding how data can be biased and knowing best practices for presenting data in charts and graphs help us build what we call data defense. These data-defense tools help us defend against quantitative misinformation and misinterpretation and help us recognize the possible warning signs of deception. We believe data literacy in civics should include instruction on how to: question and validate the data source, recognize biased data, properly critique and interpret charts and graphs, and develop a Fermi estimate — a quick back-of-the-envelope approximation to assess whether or not a numerical claim is plausible, and understand confirmation bias.
An article published last year in The New York Times, “The Market Has Had a Fabulous Run, but This Peak Doesn’t Really Matter,” illustrates the value of a Fermi estimate. The author discusses the value of investing $1,000 in the Vanguard S&P 500 in 1976 as of November 2023 and states, “Your $1,000 would have increased by $16,145,400. That’s not an error.” Actually, it is an error.
There is a rule of thumb based on historical returns: investing in the S&P 500 (roughly an 11% average annual return) can double your money every seven years. A quick Fermi estimate then is given by 2023-1976 = 47 years, 47/7 = 6.7 or about 7. Now, 2 raised to the seventh power is 128. Hence an approximate estimate of the value of that $1,000 investment is $128,000. The true value of the increase, posted later in a correction, is $161,454. Clearly, the original value of $16,145,400 is off by two decimal places. The S&P 500 might remain a smart investment, but you will be very disappointed if your expectations are set by the original value stated in the article.
There is renewed interest in civics in K-12 education. Given how data-driven society has become, with everything from recommendation engines to communication on health care issues, to political redistricting, to misinformation on social media, we believe data literacy is fundamental to being an informed citizen in the 21st century. Freedom of speech is foundational to a functioning democracy, so censorship is not a likely solution to pervasive misinformation. Rather, informing our citizens on how to combat misinformation, including data literacy, is the logical alternative.
Jeffrey Camm holds the Inmar Presidential Chair in Analytics in the Wake Forest University School of Business. Derek Gibson is a VP of Analytics in a financial services firm. Portions of this piece are based on their recent book, Data Duped: How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation. Both are members of INFORMS, the premier international association for the decision and data sciences. INFORMS has been involved in pursuing the Data Science Literacy Act on Capitol Hill.
The post In 2025, you can’t have an effective democracy without data literacy first appeared on Federal News Network.