How Do Your Students Use REAL Data?

How do your students use data in real and meaningful ways? 

Before you can answer that question, you may need to back up to consider how YOU use data in real and meaningful ways. If you reflect on a typical day, I imagine you may be analyzing and interpreting data more often than you consciously realize. You may notice trends in your spending when you check your bank account online, or you may be interpreting graphs as you read your daily news updates. So then what do you do after you read something that contains data? More than likely, you take a moment to reflect on the patterns you are noticing (or a lack thereof) and consider if you need to take action of some sort. Do I like what I am seeing? Or is there something I can do differently to try to make a change to what the data will show in the future?

Data literacy is becoming an increasingly popular conversation in the world of math education, and for good reason! Jo Boaler and her YouCubed staff have started a data literacy movement, and they are even writing a course for California high schoolers take because they believe it is so critical.  

Being data literate is truly an equity issue. If a person does not have a solid understanding of numbers or does not understand how to interpret and analyze data, they can be taken advantage of in life. 

More importantly, a solid understanding of data allows people to notice patterns and relationships that cause concern so they can take action and change behaviors to improve future outcomes.

So what does this mean for educators, particularly of educators of young children who typically do not have many learning standards devoted to collecting, representing, interpreting, and analyzing data? It means you integrate it into regular class conversations anyway because this is critical to being a savvy citizen and a change agent.

In Early Childhood Education, we begin to formalize mathematical thinking with the idea of grouping and sorting. We can help children start to form ideas related to making data visible if we help them group and sort in more organized ways. Our preschoolers at GEMS World Academy Chicago have begun collecting their own data as they go on community walks to observe the animals they see as a part of their inquiry into how animals, including humans, depend and rely on each other. Notice how they drew the lines themselves to separate their paper into three categories, one for each animal they are looking for, and how they are drawing dots/circles in a category each time they see an animal. While they are not formally creating a bar graph or pictograph, they are developing an understanding of how they can visually keep track of and categorize their observations to help them reflect on what they saw. While some students at this age can quantify, this type of visual representation makes it easy for any child to see when they saw none in a category versus when they saw many in a category. 

Our goal is to continue to build on this momentum started from a very young age to support students in developing their desire to visualize data they collect, and we begin to support them in using the data to analyze the data and then interpret these conclusions. While students still may not be able to create graphs independently, our Kindergarten classes harness the power of creating class graphs to draw conclusions based on the visual of their data so they are learning to read and interpret graphs before they are able to independently make graphs. 

As a part of their inquiry into how humans produce and dispose of waste, our Kindergarten classes decided to collect data on the amount of food waste generated each day from their lunches at school. Using a scale and support from the teachers, a class graph was added to over time, noticing each day how much waste was generated and if it was more or less waste than the day prior. Students began to notice on days when there was more food waste, it was tied to the types of foods they had for lunch! In an effort to take action and combat this problem, our Kindergarten classes drew pictures and wrote letters to the lunch supplier to suggest changes to the menu that they think will result in less food waste. 

In third grade, the students are able to graph data independently and can really take the interpretation step further to focus on creating more detailed action plans. This year, our third graders collected and graphed data related to plastic waste their class generated each day over the course of a week as a part of their inquiry into how humans impact the environment in different ways over time. After creating their bar graphs either by hand or using Apple's Keynote, students noticed there were clearly areas where our school could make improvements. They then created a proposal which they presented to our school leadership team. Using a variety of calculations, they were able to articulate clearly why the ideas were proposing would not only save the school money but also result in less single use plastic trash. They were able to take action in their homes as well, bringing home some of these same ideas so they could produce less single use plastic waste at home. 

Understanding how to interpret data is powerful, but that is only a start. If our students start collecting, visualizing, interpreting, and analyzing data from a very early age, just think of what they will be able to do when they encounter data in various forms as they grown older. They will be the change agents we need to make our world a better place!