Agentic Data-Engagement Positions¶

Element · All elements
Evidence · 3 claims (2 for, 1 mixed) · 3 studies (3 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 3 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

This element names four proactive roles learners can take up when engaging with real-world, ongoing ("lively") data about an issue that affects them: (1) active researcher/consumer — navigating, cross-checking, and tracking data and data narratives across sources and scales to determine credibility; (2) analyst — constructing knowledge by comparing, recontextualizing, and critiquing data (e.g., relating national vaccination statistics to one's own family's experience); (3) author — producing new data or narratives, such as documenting one's own or a community's first-hand experience where official data is missing or delayed; and (4) socio-scientific communicator/advocate — relaying, explaining, or advocating for data-informed action to others, such as a peer group or family. Learners do not necessarily move through these in a fixed sequence; the same learner can occupy different positions at different points as an issue unfolds, and a single episode can layer multiple positions at once.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

An ongoing, real-world issue where data is incomplete, contested, delayed, or unevenly accessible (e.g., not translated into the learner's language), leaving room for learners to do more than passively receive settled facts
Space and legitimacy for learners to introduce their own or their community's first-hand experience as data, not just official/institutional sources

Constraints¶

Depends on there being a genuine data gap or uncertainty for learners to actively work in — a topic with complete, settled, easily accessible official data offers less room for the analyst/author positions specifically to matter

Target Learners¶

Learners from communities where official data is delayed, incomplete, or produced in a way that excludes them (e.g., not translated into their first language), giving them reason to actively seek, question, and supplement it

Target Learning Goals¶

Building socio-scientific decision-making capacity that integrates personal, community, and official/scientific data rather than treating personal experience as illegitimate
Agentic engagement with lively data supports epistemically just crisis sensemaking [+W]

Affordances¶

Epistemic Injustice — names why legitimizing the analyst/author positions specifically (not just the researcher/consumer position) matters for equity
Inquiry-Based Learning

Claims¶

(none yet linked)

Examples¶

Four Palestinian-Arab minority youth in Israel used all four positions across the COVID-19 pandemic: cross-checking Hebrew- and Arabic-language sources and social media (researcher/consumer), relating national vaccination-effectiveness data to their own family's repeat infections (analyst), documenting symptoms official sources hadn't mentioned yet (author), and distributing safety information to peers (communicator).

Key Sources¶

Sedawi, W., & Calabrese Barton, A. (2024). Toward epistemic justice in socio-scientific decision-making: How youth make sense of lively COVID-19 and vaccines data. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(4-5), 667-718. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2381205

Page metadata

Field	Value
`type`	`element`
`id`	`agentic-data-engagement-positions`
`title`	`Agentic Data-Engagement Positions`
`description`	`A set of four proactive roles — active researcher/consumer, analyst, author, and socio-scientific communicator — that learners can take up when engaging with real-world data, rather than being positioned as passive recipients of official data.`
`status`	`review`
`canonical`	`True`
`generated`	by `claude/unspecified` on `2026-08-29`
`trust`	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
`sources`	1 — `sedawi-calabrese-barton-2024`

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