Middle school students’ reasoning about data and context through storytelling with repurposed local data

Abstract

Publicly-available datasets, though useful for education, are often constructed for purposes that are quite different from students' own. To investigate and model phenomena, then, students must learn how to repurpose the data. This paper reports on an emerging line of research that builds on work in data modeling, exploratory data analysis, and storytelling to examine and support students' data repurposing. We ask: What opportunities emerge for students to reason about the relationship between data, context, and uncertainty when they repurpose public data to explore questions about their local communities? And, How can these opportunities be supported in classroom instruction and activity design? In two exploratory studies, students were asked to pose questions about their communities, use publicly-available data to explore those questions, and create visual displays and written stories about their findings. Across both enactments, opportunities for reasoning emerged especially when students worked to reconcile (1) their own knowledge and experiences of the context from which data were collected with details of the data provided; and (2) their different emerging stories about the data with one another. We review how these opportunities unfolded within each enactment at the level of group and classroom, with attention to facilitator support.

A Learning Progression for Constructing and Interpreting Data Display

“…Thus the author suggested that "both data-context and learning-experience-contexts may need to be taken into account when developing learners' reasoning from data" (Pfannkuch, 2011, p. 43). Similar observations are reported in the literature on the relationships between data and context (e.g., Ben-Zvi & Aridor-Berger, 2016;Wilkerson & Laina, 2018).…”

Data Moves

“…What types of instruction and supports enable students to gain confidence in manipulating data? Some studies (e.g., Wilkerson & Laina, 2018) are emerging, but we need more. To save the reader from even more exposition-for the time being-we will simply present a slew of potential questions that could be explored:…”

Reflective Data Storytelling for Youth: The CODAP Story Builder

“…In doing so, our project recognizes that a great deal of conceptual and personal work goes into students' initial preparation and exploration of data. For example, students may seek a grounding in the data by filtering and searching a dataset to find specific records that represent themselves or other familiar information [18,21]. Or, they might want to reduce the complexity of their initial investigation by focusing on only a few key attributes of a large dataset, expanding their investigation later [7].…”