Identifying the Steps in an Exploratory Data Analysis: A Process-Oriented Approach

Best practices in (teaching) data literacy, specifically Exploratory Data Analysis, remain an area of tacit knowledge until this day. However, with the increase in the amount of data and its importance in organisations, analysing data is becoming a much-needed skill in today's society. Within this paper, we describe an empirical experiment that was used to examine the steps taken during an exploratory data analysis, and the order in which these actions were taken. Twenty actions were identified. Participants followed a rather iterative process of working step by step towards the solution. In terms of the practices of novice and advanced data analysts, few relevant differences were yet discovered.