With a call for schools to infuse data across the curriculum, many are creating curricula and examining students’ thinking in data-intensive problems. As the discipline of statistics education broadens to data science education, there is a need to examine how practices in data science can inform work in K-12. We synthesize literature about statistics investigation processes, data science as a field and practices of data scientists. Further, we provide results from an ethnographic and interview study of the work of data scientists. Together, these inform a new framework to support data investigation processes. We explicate the practices and dispositions needed and offer a glimpse of how the framework can be used to move the discipline of data science education forward.