Data literacy is an important skill for modern students to develop. This paper describes an in-class activity designed to give students practice with data literacy by discussing and analyzing data on the historical and modern levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). It is designed for general education students with a rudimentary knowledge of means and standard deviations and could easily be adapted for wider audiences. This activity supports the data literacy skills required to analyze the severity and context of changes in Earth’s CO2 levels. In addition, it can be used by instructors as part of a unit addressing climate change. The introduction describes the sources of CO2 data used in this paper, followed by a description of the main activity, then a potential extension to the activity, and the paper concludes with a discussion of potential outcomes.
The main activity is designed to take up to...