Teaching About Ambiguity in Analytics: A Student-Centered Semester-Long Project to Raise Awareness of Ambiguity by Predicting Student Exam Performance

The growing use of analytics has increased the demand for more highly data literate graduates. Awareness of ambiguity in data has been suggested as a new data literacy skill. Here, we describe a student- centered semester-long project that can be used to teach this skill in an introductory analytics or database course. The project requires students to anticipate and collect survey data about themselves and their fellow students that can be used to predict student exam performance later in the course. We summarize relevant prior research on ambiguity, describe the project in which ambiguity is explained and applied, present a preliminary analysis of the lesson's impact on student awareness of ambiguity, and discuss implications and future research.