Amanda Kleintop and Cora Wigger

Amanda Kleintop, assistant professor of history, and Cora Wigger, assistant professor of economics, are the 2025-2027 CEL Scholar (joint appointment). Together, they will focus on advancing data literacy in engaged learning and developing interdisciplinary resources to help faculty and students critically analyze and apply data across fields.

"As concepts become more abstract, reaching agreement on appropriate measurement strategies becomes more difficult." -Cora Wigger

Defining and Measuring 

This semester, I’ve been working with two wonderful students doing mentored research projects of their own design. As they’ve been developing their research questions, I am reminded fondly of an exercise I did in a research methods class during grad school.   The professor, Dr. Ellen Goldring,…

"Instead of separating AI literacy and data literacy, we see data literacy as a key precursor to AI literacy." -Cora Wigger

Data Literacy as a Precursor to AI Literacy 

As the new school year begins and our weeks are filled with slide edits, planning meetings, and the smell of new notebooks, one theme is dominating the preparation: Artificial Intelligence. I am not an AI expert. I have no tips…

"There were a host of lessons to be learned about what it means to engage in equitable and engaged teaching of data literacy." -Amanda Kleintop & Cora Wigger

Engaging Students in Transcribing Historical Data: About the Project 

In this post and a series of student contributions that follow, we describe a summer project where we engaged with students doing transcription work of historical archival documents. While the original conception of the project started off as purely oriented…

Students can struggle to understand that who collects, who reports, and who disseminates information can all be different. These are questions students must learn to ask of their data, and answering those questions is a skill they must spend time practicing.”

Learning Your Data: Teaching with Data Biographies 

“It’s not ethical to use a dataset without spending time getting a very good understanding of what the data means.”  Heather Kraus When I started teaching an applied statistics class for undergraduates, I resolved to give my students as much…

"Instead of saying ‘it’s biased,’ we want students to be able to explain how something is biased, how we can learn from it, and how to use that knowledge to take steps to keep improving upon our understandings of the world.”

Data Literacy in Engaged Learning: Understanding Bias

Over my career as a student and professor, I (Amanda) have come to learn, with the help of my colleague Dr. Cora Wigger that understanding bias in research is essential to understanding causes and perpetuation of racism. In my first…