The possibilities of exploring nontraditional datasets with young children

Abstract

Today's world is characterized by the extensive production of data in different scenarios that everyday citizens need to understand for their informed participation in society. With the increase in the availability of data in a society defined by the industrious production of data, the educational system needs to think of possibilities to bring young children closer to the world of data science. This paper presents a nontraditional data exploration experience with an 8‐year‐old participant helped by a data visualization tool. A task‐based interview was conducted while the participant explored a carbon dioxide emission dataset. This paper studied how the participant interrogates the data, draws inferences and exhibits dispositions. At the end, some reflections are presented when introducing the exploration of nontraditional data in teaching.

Experiencias de aprendizaje con datos cívicos para la Ciudadanía Global

“…La experiencia de aprendizaje llevada a cabo con el estudiante de la escuela primaria revela que desde temprana edad se pueden explorar posibilidades en el manejo de datos multivariados para formar el sentido crítico que requieren los problemas globales. Estos resultados coinciden con estudios anteriores que sugieren que hay una tendencia de los adultos a subestimar la capacidad crítica en la infancia (Makar et al, 2023;Zapata-Cardona, 2023), explicado posiblemente por la limitación de espacios de formación docente para atender los desafíos de la enseñanza de la estadística en la educación infantil (Porciúncula;Batisti, 2023). Quizás la clave pueda estar en el diseño de las experiencias de aprendizaje.…”

Introduction to rethinking learners' reasoning with nontraditional data

“…Zapata-Cardona's work [19] focuses on creating strategies for teaching young learners about how to use data to make sense of and find solutions to critical and complex societal problems. She shares a case study of an 8-year-old child as he uses CODAP to explore, interrogate, and make conjectures regarding a data set of carbon dioxide emissions of various countries over the past 59 years.…”

“…The articles in this issue focus on new approaches to the teaching and learning of data practices related to messy, complex, or nontraditional data from the youngest learners [8,19] to secondary learners [14,17], undergraduate students [15,16], graduate students, teachers, and researchers [2,5,9,17]. There are two overarching themes in the articles in this special issue: new ways to consider data visualizations in the classroom [2,5,14,17,19] and new approaches or elements that need to be considered in the teaching and learning of data science practices [8,9,15,16].…”