Investigating Educational Data Literacy Needs in Italian Schools: A Multidimensional, Role–Differentiated Approach from the SCHOOLWISE Needs Assessment

Educational data literacy figures in European policy as a competence schools are expected to develop, yet its conceptual foundations remain unsettled. A recent comparative review of four research traditions reports that no single model encompasses all five domains of practice (technical, pedagogical, organizational, ethical, and transversal), that the competencies ascribed to teachers and to school leaders are seldom differentiated, and that the organizational domain receives least attention (Manganello et al., in press). The traditions compared are partial in instructive respects: the data–based decision–making and teacher data literacy strands situate competence primarily in the individual teacher and orient it toward school improvement (Mandinach & Gummer, 2016; Schildkamp, 2019), whereas the critical strand maintains that data practices are not neutral but encode assumptions and norms that reflect established regimes of power and knowledge (Raffaghelli & Stewart, 2020). What remains underspecified is how data literacy is configured beyond the individual role, across the scales at which schooling is governed, and where the organizational and infrastructural conditions these frameworks least articulate reside. The present contribution develops this diagnosis empirically within SCHOOLWISE, an Erasmus+ Forward–Looking project concerned with how schools understand, govern, and use data for improvement. With reference to the Italian strand of the data collection, it addresses three research questions. First, how are data literacy needs configured across professional roles and across scales of action, from the classroom to the national evaluation body? Second, does the role differentiation left underspecified by current frameworks operate as a meaningful distinction when actors describe their own work? Third, at which points do the data that each actor regards as most relevant to its decisions and the infrastructure available to it diverge? They are examined through a stratified qualitative needs assessment that juxtaposes actors at four scales, to render observable the organizational dimension that surveys of individual competence overlook.