Situating Data Science

The emerging field of Data Science has had a large impact on science and society. This book explores how one distinguishing feature of Data Science – its focus on data collected from social and environmental contexts within which learners often find themselves deeply embedded – suggests serious implications for learning and education. Drawing from theories of learning and identity development in the learning sciences, this volume investigates the impacts of these complex relationships on how learners think about, use, and share data, including their understandings of data in light of history, race, geography, and politics. More than just using ‘real world examples’ to motivate students to work with data, this book demonstrates how learners’ relationships to data shape how they approach those data with agency, as part of their social and cultural lives. Together, the contributions offer a vision of how the learning sciences can contribute to a more expansive, socially aware, and transformative Data Science Education. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.