Relating to Data: How are we currently shaping K-12 student experiences with quantitative data?
Speaker Series
Speaker
Dr. Victor Lee, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Abstract
Data are becoming pervasive in nearly all facets of our lives. In light of this, students’ fluency with data will become a more prominent concern for K-12 education. What that will look like is still unclear. This talk takes seriously that a data-intensive educational future is coming and will cover three projects that are concerned with how data will be encountered in K-12 education. One study draws from a multi-year design-based research project with rural upper elementary students who explored elementary statistics using data of their own school day activities as obtained from wearable activity trackers. Another study examines what are curriculum designers currently talking about when they claim to be teaching students data science. The last study involves analysis of recently collected interview data from high school statistics teachers. Through a knowledge-in-pieces theoretical lens, we ask what teachers notice in tabular representations of quantitative data and how they decide when such a data set is preferable for use in the classroom. Taken together, the studies help to map out some of the areas where more work can be done if the learning sciences are to develop a research agenda around K-12 data science education.