On July 21, 2021, David F. Weiman, the Alena Wels Hirschorn ‘58 Professor of Economics and Director of the Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) at Barnard College, alongside Alisa Rod, former Associate Director of the ERC, Fatima Koli ’17, current Associate Director of the ERC, Anna Carlson ’18, a former post-baccalaureate fellow at the ERC, and Jennifer Green, former Dean of Barnard Library & Academic Information Services, saw the chapter they wrote together about the ERC published in a new book, titled Data Literacy in Academic Libraries: Teaching Critical Thinking with Numbers.
The book as a whole examines the concept of data literacy — an understanding of how to read, collect, and manipulate data — and the importance of teaching this skill to college students as they prepare to enter the workforce. The chapter co-authored by Weiman et. al., titled “The Barnard College Empirical Reasoning Center: A Case Study in Developing a Service Model for Teaching Data Literacy across Disciplines,” discusses the work of Barnard’s Empirical Reasoning Center, which provides workshops and walk-in consultations to more than a thousand students annually, while explaining how the ERC has been used to teach data literacy across academic disciplines