Α personal data literacy framework for students: identifying and supporting students’ competencies about their personal data

Abstract

To increase children’s agency in the data economy, efforts should be made to empower them by helping them become personal data literate. Personal data literacy involves a spectrum of technical, conceptual, and critical competencies necessary for children to recognize, reflect, and respond to socio-economic practices of Big Data. Research has shown that children and adolescents have difficulties in recognizing and understanding how, when, by whom, and why their personal data are being collected, processed, and reused, while many reports confirm violation of children’s data rights. Existing frameworks on the matter have focused either on adults, or do not explicitly discuss how such kind of literacy can be conceptualized for children, what kind of competencies children, as a special population, might need to develop, and what kind of literacy interventions might work best. This doctoral thesis, reporting on research efforts to develop a competency framework for identifying and supporting students’ competencies about their personal digital data, investigated the following overarching research question: How can the design of educational interventions, aiming to foster students’ personal data literacy, be supported? Following a design-based research approach, and employing qualitative methods, this doctoral research collected data from three elementary schools, six classrooms, and a total of 103 students. This doctoral thesis first reports on the design of a learning module to enable upper elementary school students to produce their own personal data using activity trackers, and reflect on them. Then, data are presented from the implementation of this learning module in three elementary school classes in Cyprus, with 63 students. The results informed the development of the PeDaL framework, a pedagogical tool demonstrating a taxonomy of competences to support the development of students’ personal data literacy. Finally, I discuss how these findings informed the redesign of the learning module, based on the PeDaL framework. The findings of this doctoral research can contribute to advancing understanding on how personal data literacy can be defined and framed for students, by demonstrating the spectrum of competencies students should have. The design and implementation of the learning module resulted in a better understanding of upper elementary school students’ data disclosure practices, supporting the identification of conceptual gaps, and of the types of pedagogical activities that students might need to develop personal data literacy competencies. This doctoral thesis concludes by discussing the main limitations of this work and avenues for further research.