#289: Towards an Empirical Understanding of Epistemic Data Agency for Middle School Students During a Data Storytelling Summer Camp

Epistemic data agency highlights learners’ capacity to take ownership of shaping their learning process with data, yet little work has examined how it can be operationalized in educational contexts. In this paper, we advance the construct of epistemic data agency by providing a list of indicative actions that demonstrate students’ epistemic stances with data. Using video recordings from a two-week middle school summer camp on data storytelling, we conducted case studies of two focal students with contrasting prior data experiences and demographics. Our analysis builds on existing frameworks of knowledge-related epistemic agency activities, which we used to identify activity-level episodes, and extends them by inductively deriving action-level indicators that specify how students engaged with data in practice. This empirical grounding offers researchers and educators an analytical framework for examining how students enact data-related agency and offers a foundation for guiding and evaluating pedagogical interventions to strengthen data literacy education.