With the increasing role of the digital spaces as the place where people obtain their information, it is often difficult to discern credible and scientific information.  The ‘STO masters’ is a transdisciplinary online Master of Science degree in Science Translation and Outreach (STO) in the College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.  This degree “builds student capacity to identify credible scientific information and incorporate that into programs relevant to issues of public concern.”   Since secondary data are one kind of information that is used in local communities in program planning, evaluation, and decision-making, it is important that students in the STO masters be conversant on how to access and accurately use data in their work.  

In addition to providing training, data, and assistance to county Extension agents and local organizations, my Extension program Kentucky: By The Numbers also focuses on data literacy and brings those skills and resources into the classroom.  For the STO masters, I develope and provide specialized training for graduate students in Program Development and Evaluation (STO 601 [CLD/SOC 665]).  This is course is one of the four required courses in the degree program.  Even with multiple year requests, no two presentations are identical.  Importantly, the landscape of publicly available data online is ever-changing.   To ensure that students receive the most current information, these presentations are tailored each semester to provide the most up-to-date data and resources available.  

With today’s online access to secondary data, it is often thought that finding secondary data is easy.   As a result, prior to viewing my presentation, graduate students in the course complete an exercise locating data for 3 real-life examples.  Since Program Development and Evaluation is asynchronistic, I provide an hour-long video that then uses the results from the students’ exercise to illustrate how to find the secondary data they are looking for, the different types of data sources available, and how to use those websites.  Throughout the presentation, I focus on data literacy skills so that students learn how to understand the data they find, the different definitions that the sources are using, and how to be critical of the way in which data are presented – especially in charts, graphs and maps.   

Since the STO masters is fully online, the week after students view the video presentation, I meet virtually with students who have questions or an interest in understanding more about the data.  This year, the students who attended the virtual meeting requested were all county Extension agents.  Noting the usefulness of the presentation and the exercise, they requested that a similar training be offered to all Extension agents that goes beyond what is already part of core training for new agents.  The agents offered to help and the training is now in the planning stages for the next year.