Community college students’ self-assessment of data literacy: exploring differences amongst demographic, academic, and career characteristics

Sarah Amber Evans is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at UNT and is currently the Coordinator for the Children’s and Young Adult Librarianship Program and a Co-Director of UNT’s Multiple Literacies Lab. In these roles, she uses her background in educational psychology and information science to examine learning across settings. Evans is currently PI on the National Science Foundation-funded project Diversifying Human-Centered Data Science through the Research and Design of Ethical Games. Previously, she was a Co-PI on the IMLS-funded project Preparing Librarians for Data Literacy Leadership, which focused on the role of librarians as data coaches in schools and public libraries.

Lingzi Hong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at UNT. Her research interests fall at the intersection of machine learning, community information studies and data-driven decision-making. She teaches data science introduction courses for undergraduate and master students. She has publications in leading academic conferences and journals, including the iConference, AAAI, NAACL, EPJ Data Science and Library and Information Science Research. She is the Co-PI of the IMLS funded project “Student Data Literacy Needs in Community Colleges”.

Jeonghyun Kim is a Professor in the Department of Information Science at UNT and is currently serving as a PI of the project titled “Student Data Literacy Needs in Community Colleges”, which is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (RE-252374-OLS-22). She was a Co-PI on an IMLS-funded project from 2011 to 2015 that built a Graduate Academic Certificate program in Digital Curation and Data Management. She has published her research in leading academic journals, including the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Library & Information Science Research and Journal of Documentation. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Electronic Library journal since 2020.

Erin Rice-Oyler is a graduate student in the Department of Information Science at UNT. She holds her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Texas at Austin. She has spent the past 20 years as an entrepreneur, starting two successful businesses. She is interested in the trends of technology and how these trends can facilitate a universal, open access to education and collaborative knowledge creation.

Irhamni Ali is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Science at UNT. He holds a BLIS from the University of Indonesia and completed a master’s in Information Technology for Library in the Computer Science Department at Bogor Agricultural University. He has 15 years of experience in strategic planning, data analytics and business processes for libraries.