Researchers

Memes have become ubiquitous artifacts of contemporary digital culture that integrate visual and textual components in order to communicate about a topic. They can be used as forms of visual argumentation that draw on cultural references while facilitating critical commentary that typically results in humorous and caustic dialogue. In this paper, we investigate the meme creation tool, DataMeme where middle school students explore graphs then construct GIFs using existing Gyphy GIFs and overlay their own text onto them in order to communicate about the meaning behind the data.

Effective data literacy instruction requires that learners move beyond understanding statistics to being able to humanize data through a contextual understanding of argumentation and reasoning in the real-world. In this paper, we explore the implementation of a co-designed data comic unit about adolescent friendships. The 7th grade unit involved students analyzing data graphs about adolescent friendships and crafting comic narratives to convey perspectives on that data.

The WeatherX project has developed two curriculum units for middle-school science classrooms. In the Local Unit, students collect and analyze weather data from their local area and compare with climate data to investigate: What is typical weather for our area? In the Mt. Washington Unit, students compare extreme weather in their local area and on New Hampshire's Mount Washington to investigate: What is extreme weather?

To promote understanding of and interest in working with data among diverse student populations, we developed and studied a high school mathematics curriculum module that examines income inequality in the United States. Designed as a multi-week set of applied data investigations, the module supports student analyses of income inequality using U.S. Census Bureau microdata and the online data analysis tool the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP).

To support preschool children’s learning about data in an applied way that allows children to leverage their existing mathematical knowledge (i.e. counting, sorting, classifying, comparing) and apply it to answering authentic, developmentally appropriate research questions with data. To accomplish this ultimate goal, a design-based research approach was used to develop and test a classroom-based preschool intervention that includes hands-on, play-based investigations with a digital app that supports and scaffolds the investigation process for teachers and children.

The Preschool Data Toolbox is a teacher-facing app plus digital teacher guide (available in the Apple and Android stores or online) that provides lesson plans for a series of data-focused investigations.

Streams of Data has created fourth-grade lesson plans for a five-day sequence about rivers and flooding. The goal of these lessons is to support development of analytical thinking skills around authentic science data. These goals include:

This article focuses on discussion and preliminary findings from classroom testing of the prototype learning module: Investigating Income Inequality in the U.S. In this module, students examine patterns of income inequality using person-level microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the U.S. decennial census.