Importance

While college sports are linked with university campuses, athletics is not seen or valued as academic. Further, deeply entrenched structural and cultural stereotypes portray athletes, especially Black men, as “dumb jocks.” While many athletes and their coaches may not perceive themselves as possessing STEM identities or competencies, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and data-driven decision making are deeply embedded in daily college sport practices. The DataGOAT (Greatest Of All Time) project will engage college athletes with data science through sport.

DataGOAT includes student athletes in the design and refinement of a curriculum and software that helps them and their communities recognize the data-driven decision making and associated STEM analysis skills already deeply embedded in their routines. By connecting sport performance and health to data analysis and visualization, this project aims to create innovative opportunities for athletes to engage academically with data science, foster their STEM identities, and facilitate educational models and career pathways from sport to STEM.

The project will co-design a transformative higher education infrastructure called DataGOAT to enable athletes to engage with data science by studying their own sports data and develop STEM identities through critical data literacy. DataGOAT will develop coursework, internships, a sports training regimen data collection tool, and an import plugin that connects student training data to CODAP for open-ended data analysis.

Research

Using longitudinal interviews, ethnographic observations, co-design workshops, and quantitative surveys, the project aims to advance knowledge generation on racial equity by researching the following questions:

• What are the structural and socio-cultural barriers and facilitators to Black athletes pursuing critical data literacy within the collegiate sports context?
• How can technology-integrated data science courses be designed to promote critical data literacy and scientific identity of Black male collegiate athletes?
• How can an infrastructure for critical data literacy courses be created in collegiate academic programs? What are the opportunities and challenges of this integration?