The Consequences of Promoting Data Literacy Among Graduate Students

Margherita Fort (), Annalisa Loviglio () and Susanna Tinti ()
Additional contact information
Margherita Fort: University of Bologna
Annalisa Loviglio: University of Bologna
Susanna Tinti: University of Bologna

No 17803, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the impact of a program designed to enhance data literacy on graduate students’ skills and academic outcomes in a large Italian university. The program (i.e. a minor) targets students who are expected to have weak quantitative competences and offers 120-hours training focused on improving the ability to interpret and process data, in addition to the regular courses of the master program in which students are enrolled (i.e. their major). The admission process to the minor is characterized by rationing, resolved by random assignment of available slots to applicants. Exploiting the resulting exogenous variation for identification, we find that the program largely improved digital literacy of participants with low pre-treatment levels of numeracy. Despite the additional effort required by the program, we can rule out any slowdown in the progress of the academic career in the major master program of participating students.

Keywords: tertiary education; minor; data literacy; human capital formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17803.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17803

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().