DAta Literacy competences For Young students towards STEAM education Erasmus Project

Project Title

DAta Literacy competences For Young students towards STEAM education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Cooperation between educational institutions and business; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

DAta Literacy competences For Young students towards STEAM education (DALFYS) – is an international strategic partnership for a school education project. The project will be held in Italy, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Romania and Turkey. The project will start on 1st of March 2021; it will be implemented during 24 months. The schools play a strategic role in preparing the younger generation for the new digital and technological society and competences in the STEAM fields are strategic in the educational context. There are several main challenges to face in order to spread relevant competences among learners and teachers and to transform the learning and teaching approach principally during this pandemic period. In particular, the current pandemic has intensified these challenges and forced us to employ in probabilistic reasoning; the statistical illiteracy in schools is today the consequence of the widespread diffusion of incorrect information known by the term “fake news”. In fact we are living the first global “event” fully data-informed, but people without basic data skills are not capable to interpret and understand pandemic indicators, daily charts and so on, therefore they are not capable of making decisions at large without being fully informed and this lack of statistical interpretation bring people to make many errors. Society would improve if the fundamental ideas of probability theory and statistics were taught in schools because students would grow the capacity of reasoning, a strong means to evaluate and to analyse.
School programs available at European level are lacking a convincing learning and study trajectory oriented towards a “data literacy-based” competence framework. The educational field is one of the sectors which has been more influenced and involved in this period of health emergency due to the spread of COVID-19. In particular, schools are called to face direct and indirect consequences: on the one hand the need to put distance learning into practice, on the other hand the various problems that arise from it such as the lack of adequate digital skills. Our project, through the use of the STEAM methodology and the spread of digital pedagogical skills, intends to support many teachers and students to face the challenges presented by this recent global change in the use of new technologies.
Data literacy is a cross-cutting competence which is relevant in all disciplines since data are used in a multitude of domains, mainly from the STEAM framework, but required knowledge, skills and attitudes related to it are dependent on the context. There is a deep gap in the training trajectory between the secondary school programs that have not a strong focus on data literacy and the Higher education programs that are offering degrees and learning paths focused on Data Science.
The DALFYS project starts from the assumption that data literacy is a transversal competence that all school students should have the right to access and integrate in their study courses. Schools across Europe are very diverse and operate within national contexts that are highly different: some schools might have less flexible didactic organisation that could hamper the application of the approach. Within the project consortium it will be possible to compare heterogeneous secondary school organisations and practices, and design a model that can fit the majority of the structures.
Use and access to data are influenced by many factors that vary from one EU Country to another: legislative measures, policies, maturity of open data, cultural perceptions and sensitivities (for instance regarding ethical issues). The participation of partners from EU Countries (Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Poland) and the participation of one no EU programme Country (Turkey) will enrich the knowledge and guarantee the consideration of all these aspects.
The DALFYS project intends to catalyze the attention on the importance of data literacy for students and future workers and to feed the debate and interest through the digital platform, that will be kept open after the end of the project, and where all the main outputs will be accessible for free. Five Intellectual will be created during the project implementation period:
– Open Inventory of good practices, case studies and EU projects.
– DALFYS Validation system.
– DALFYS learning platform.
– Training resources and approaches for secondary school teachers.
– Piloting the DALFYS approach: Implementation strategy.
In order to present the intellectual output produced in the project to all relevant stakeholders a final conference will be organized. The aims of the final conference are two fold: firstly the final conference is a key dissemination event and it will promote the data literacy approaches in secondary school institutes thus motivating schools but also enterprises in implementing the DALFYS products in the context of data literacy education.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 267048 Eur

Project Coordinator

Istituto Tecnico Economico e Tecnologico “Girolamo Caruso” & Country: IT

Project Partners

• Siauliu Didzdvario gimnazija
• DATANINJA SOCIETA A RESPONSABILITA LIMITATA SEMPLIFICATA
• TED BURSA KOLEJI
• DC EDUKACJA SPOLKA Z OGRANICZONA ODPOWIEDZIALNOSCIA
• LICEUL TEHNOLOGIC COSTACHE CONACHI
• BUPNET BILDUNG UND PROJEKT NETZWERKGMBH
• CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE