Heck, it could be argued that the moment a child learns that 5 is bigger than 3, that's nascent data literacy. That being said, in terms of what most would mean by DL, the concepts of averages and outliers are certainly recognizable by ages 8 or 9, seems to me. Most know some form of sports, all know about temperatures, etc. The 30 kids in a classroom can be given coins to flip, and then discover that Timmy in the back row got 5 straight heads. Wow! What gives him that special power? These are games that are fun and very instructive to get children to think about randomness.
I often talk about my son - now 7 - and our (tongue-in-cheek) disappointment when we discovered he couldn’t read or write or talk when he was born. I joke that instead of enrolling him in an undergraduate degree in English literature that we began to sing to him, and read to him, and play word games and watch Sesame Street.
Data literacy is no different. We don’t need to start this journey with expensive courses or piles of textbooks - we need to immerse ourselves (and our children) in the concepts of data literacy as soon as possible. The more comfortable we are with the numbers, the questions, the logic, the critical thinking - the more commonplace will data literacy become.
I say start young!
The age you are now is the best time to start.
I'm working with my 8 year old granddaughters on Creative Writing. Hey that's not Data Literacy? Yeah it is. In order to write you have to write a million questions first. Where is the Narwhal family going to live? Do they have any relatives in the town? What will daddy Narwhals job be?
Curiosity is a critical key to Data Literacy. Gotta learn to ask questions, more questions and then another question.
Point of my rambling is that Data Literacy is all around us if we tie the elements together. We don't have to say "Hey let me teach about data." Let's Montessori this stuff. Teach it where there interests already lay and work from there.
I would definitely not want to count anyone out - as other folks have said, every age is old enough!
But, is anyone else concerned about a missing group in all of this? Specifically 26 - 30 year olds who didn't quite grow up with social media (it became a thing when they were nearing the end of middle/start of high school) and may not have been exposed to it in college, but also aren't benefiting from some of the recent trends in data education around literacy and competencies.
My daughter is 8 and I have a few ideas on some Youtube videos her and I can do together that keep things really simple but hone in on how pictures can help drive comprehension of data.
As soon as basic math, counting, sorting by colors/shapes, ordering blocks by size is introduced to toddlers and preschoolers, we are starting with data literacy. That progressively moves to advanced mathematical concepts. One thing that is overlooked is how to cohesively explain the quantitative learning or activity that was just done. That is the stepping stone to data interpretation and data story telling. My daughter is 5 and does well in math. We are consciously encouraging more of story telling and public speaking to her.
I actually say any age, to be honest. In reality, children as they get bigger are already doing their data literacy journeys. It then becomes our responsibility to not stop it. Kids are naturally curious, and being naturally curious, they are already well on their way to being data literate and successful with data. For whatever reason, as we get bigger, we lose our curiosity. We need to keep that going with children, they love curiosity and they foster it naturally...so let's not stop it.
Second, kids already love stories, as young as two years old, they love stories. They also use their imagination. This needs to continue to grow and yield fruit.
Overall, we need to help kiddos keep their data literacy skills already embedded in them, and then help them get better with data and analytics. As for adults or older than kids, we need to rekindle that curiosity and creativity. That will help them succeed.