6467 Views (as of 05/2023)
  1. Josephine Louie
  2. Senior Research Scientist
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Education Development Center
  1. Beth Chance
  2. http://www.rossmanchance.com/chance/
  3. Professor
  4. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  5. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
  1. Emily Fagan
  2. Non Profit
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Education Development Center
  1. Soma Roy
  2. Professor
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
  1. Jenn Stiles
  2. https://www.edc.org/staff/jennifer-stiles
  3. Research Associate
  4. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  5. Education Development Center

Strengthening Data Literacy across the Curriculum

NSF Awards: 1813956

2021 (see original presentation & discussion)

Grades 9-12

This video presents highlights of an early-stage project that has been developing and researching high school curriculum modules that integrate social justice topics with statistical data investigations to promote skills and interest in data science among underrepresented groups in STEM. Targeted toward students in non-Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics and statistics classes, the modules provide students with opportunities to examine the social and economic conditions of groups in U.S. society using person-level microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the U.S. decennial census. One module focuses on Investigating Income Inequality in the U.S., and another module focuses on Investigating Immigration to the U.S. Students use the online tool CODAP to conduct their data investigations.

The video shares the project's approach and examples of the strong, positive responses to the curriculum materials that students and teachers have shared. Initial research findings indicate statistically significant growth in students' interest in statistics and data analysis as well as in understanding of core statistical concepts after completing a project module. Future work aims to build and expand upon on the prototype modules, develop in-depth teacher supports for implementing rich social justice data investigations, and conduct rigorous testing of student impacts.

 

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Discussion from the 2021 STEM For All Video Showcase (45 posts)
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 10, 2021 | 06:31 p.m.

    Welcome, and thank you for visiting our site! Our project is driven by the twin goals of broadening participation in data science among students from historically marginalized groups, and building students’ understandings of U.S. social and economic conditions using real, large-scale, social science data.

    As an early-stage project, we have developed and tested multi-week curriculum modules for high school non-AP mathematics and statistics classes, in collaboration with mathematics and social studies teachers. Using person-level microdata from the U.S. Census and CODAP data analysis tools, students investigate patterns of income inequality and claims about immigration in the U.S.

    Our initial research has found significant student gains in understanding of fundamental data concepts and growth in students’ interests in statistics and data analysis after module use. We are excited by our findings, and wonder:

    • What efforts have you made to support students’ statistical thinking and data practices with data investigations that prompt conversations about social justice?
    • What challenges have you encountered, and what supports are needed?

    We’d love to hear about your interests and efforts in this domain. Let’s talk!

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Jennifer Ward

    Jennifer Ward

    Associate Adjunct Faculty
    May 11, 2021 | 01:51 p.m.

    Hi Josephine!

    This topic is right up my alley! This year I've been using activities from Skew the Script and from the book High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice by Berry, Conway, Lawler, and Staley in my community college statistics classes. I've liked the diversity of topics I have at my disposal from these two sources. What I really like from the HS Lessons book is the focus on empowering students to DO something about the inequality they see. 

    I've used CODAP before. How are students taught CODAP? Were they taught in classes before the pandemic? How have you, or have you, modified your modules due to how schooling has changed due to the pandemic?

    I teach strictly online (not remote) so getting students to have a robust conversation is a challenge. I've turned to using Google Jamboards as an easy way to share ideas (it beats scrolling a discussion board!), but there's not much back-and-forth conversation. I'm not sure how to fix that. 

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 12:22 a.m.

    Hi Jennifer,

    Thanks very much for your interest, comments, and questions! It is great that you've been using lessons from Skew the Script and Berry et al.'s book. Our work is very much in the same spirit, and was inspired by the earlier writings of Lawrence Lesser and Eric Gutstein (and Gutstein's colleagues). Our team knows how much time it takes to identify compelling questions that relate to students' lives, and find datasets that can help students explore these questions. AND build guided investigations that both allow data exploration and provide sufficient support so students can reach learning goals. Our team has loved working with teachers to develop and test these types of data-focused learning experiences.

    In our modules, we provide written tips and guides to help students learn the CODAP tools they need to explore the driving questions of each lesson. But we found during our pre-Covid in-person iterations that many students preferred having the teacher demonstrate in class how to use relevant CODAP features. After high schools went remote/hybrid, teachers and students continued to find it most efficient to learn CODAP tools through teacher demonstrations, accompanied by our written guides on the side.

    Hats off to you for teaching fully online and working hard to promote strong student discussion in this format. We tested one module with teachers and students in person pre-Covid, and the same module (slightly streamlined) with teachers and students in a hybrid format during the pandemic. We haven't yet analyzed our data to compare the two implementations fully. But we can tell from our classroom observations and initial teacher reports that the level of student discussion was much, much higher when students were in person. Teachers reported that it was very hard to get students to talk to each other in breakout rooms.

    However, we have started to notice that when students were remote, their written responses to lesson assignments often seemed more thoughtful and detailed compared to when students were in class together. We are wondering if for some students, the pandemic prompted deeper reflection. I wonder if in online learning settings, when students are typically learning more independently, if there are ways to promote deeper student dialogue within themselves or with one other person (like the teacher or another classmate). But here I'm just speculating, and brewing new research ideas... =)

     
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    Sage Lichtenwalner
  • Icon for: Jacob Sagrans

    Jacob Sagrans

    Researcher
    May 11, 2021 | 11:12 a.m.

    Wow, this is a fabulous project! I love the idea of using social justice issues that are relevant to youth as a way of getting them engaged with large-scale, real-world data. We are doing this some too in our "COVID Inspired Data Science Education through Epidemiology" project (see our video here: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentations/1984). We have a session in our clubs where we look at racial disparities in COVID-19--comparing rates of COVID among different populations and learning about/discussing the many complex factors that have led to these inequities. 

    I have a question about using microdata, which we haven't used in our project yet, but we are hoping to use in the future, as we think it can be more understandable in some ways having a dataset where each row is a person rather than an aggregate number of people in, say, a specific state on a specific date. I have looked some at ACS data and COVID data at the individual person level and have found these datasets are often more complicated than more aggregated/summary data, and they often have a lot of missing values. How do you deal with this challenge in your project?

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 11, 2021 | 01:00 p.m.

    Hi Jacob,

    Thanks for watching our video and visiting our site! It is great to meet other researchers and educators who are working to promote data literacy among students by having them explore and investigate real-world, relevant issues with large-scale data.

    Yes, we specifically sought to use person-level microdata in our project for a couple reasons. For one, we come to the project with the hypothesis that students will better relate to data they have not collected themselves if they can see individuals and their attributes in the datasets they use.

    Second, one of our research goals is to promote and support students' multivariable thinking -- that is, giving students opportunities to explore and make sense of confounding and interaction effects when working with more than two variables. This is a skill that statistics educators have noted is critical for working with big, real data, and has not been emphasized in K-12 curricula. The most recent Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE II) report highlights how this type of thinking should be introduced before college. By allowing students to work with person-level data, we have them explore questions such as: What is the gap in incomes between males and females in the U.S.? How does this gap change (and does it even go away) when controlling for education, or region, or part-time/full-time work status?

    Our ultimate data sources are the U.S. decennial census and the annual American Community Survey, and we accessed person-level data through IPUMS-USA from the University of Minnesota. Our wonderful CODAP partners at The Concord Consortium built a plug-in tool into CODAP that now allows anyone in the public to access person-level micro-data from these sources going as far back as 1850 to 2017. Our project selected a large set of person-level attributes that students can explore. And our CODAP partners worked with the IPUMS folks to figure out how to deal with sample weighting, so people and students who download extracts from the portal don't have to deal with sample weights, and they can know that each person in their dataset counts as a single person.

    As you can see, I love talking about this work, so feel free to ask more questions if you have them. And if I can't answer, I'll direct you to one of my brilliant team members who most likely can!

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
    Jacob Sagrans
  • Icon for: Jacob Sagrans

    Jacob Sagrans

    Researcher
    May 11, 2021 | 01:20 p.m.

    This is a very helpful explanation. Thank you, Josephine!

  • Icon for: Marcia Gumpertz

    Marcia Gumpertz

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 11, 2021 | 11:26 a.m.

    I'd love to see some modules like this for college and graduate Statistics courses, too!

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 11, 2021 | 01:13 p.m.

    Hi Marcia,

    Thanks for your comment, and visiting our site! We would love to work with higher ed faculty in four-year and two-year institutions who may be interested in these types of materials. Two members of our team are statistics faculty at Cal Poly, and while I'll let them speak for themselves, they have have been exploring some of these datasets and and ideas with their undergraduate students. 

    We know that there have been many efforts in the U.S. and across the world among statistics educators, particularly in higher ed, to bring real data and real issues into the classroom. We are connected with the ProCivicsStats project in Europe, which will be publishing a book from Springer later this year on datasets and lesson ideas they have developed to promote civic statistics across the world. Centering statistics and data science education around real-world socioeconomic and policy issues makes the learning meaningful and reaches students who may not, for a variety of reasons, see themselves as "data" or "numbers" people. Our early research suggests that this approach can help change students' views of themselves and their interests in working with data.

     

  • Icon for: Marcia Gumpertz

    Marcia Gumpertz

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 11, 2021 | 01:17 p.m.

    Hi Josephine,

    Thanks for your response. I'm also interested in using social justice data as a means to connect Statistics majors with the wider world and the impact that they can have on societal issues through their work in statistics.

  • Icon for: Soma Roy

    Soma Roy

    Co-Presenter
    Professor
    May 11, 2021 | 05:44 p.m.

    Hi Marcia,

    Totally agree with you on the value of using the social justice context to help Statistics majors (and minors, and pretty much all college students) see how relevant statistics and data skills are to understanding the world around them. I am a statistics faculty member at Cal Poly, SLO, and have used some of these contexts in my intro stats classes. On the end-of-term surveys students often report the wage gap explorations as ones that made the biggest impressions. We hope to develop more such lessons and modules, and use them at the college level - both with majors and non-majors. 

    - Soma

  • Icon for: Marcia Gumpertz

    Marcia Gumpertz

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 12, 2021 | 08:39 a.m.

    Hi Soma,

    If you have any materials that would be good for use in a regression/analysis of variance course, I'd be very happy to try them out!

  • Icon for: Jan Mokros

    Jan Mokros

    Researcher
    May 11, 2021 | 12:10 p.m.

    Yes, this is a very important project.  How is the collaboration between math and social studies teachers working?  Are the "pairs" invested in co-teaching, or are the math teachers seeing themselves as the data experts with the social studies teachers being content experts.  I think this may be an opportunity to move out of disciplinary silos, and I'm wondering how this is playing out.

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 11, 2021 | 01:36 p.m.

    Hi Jan,

    Thank you for checking out our video! Thanks for asking about our interdisciplinary collaboration efforts. In the first year of our project we worked with 5 mathematics/statistics teachers and 5 social studies teachers, (mostly) paired from the same high schools, to help us develop our "alpha" version of our two modules. It is important to note that none of them co-taught together -- either before or after joining our project. However, their department heads were supportive of them collaborating as part of our project, and they worked together to provide feedback and learn to use our materials. The cross-disciplinary collaboration that we observed happened mostly during our PD/materials development sessions, when mathematics teachers supported social studies teachers as they learned to explore data in CODAP together, and when social studies teachers provided us with ideas on driving questions to anchor lessons and ways to support conversations about difficult social justice issues.

    By design, our materials were tailored primarily for use in non-AP mathematics or statistics classes, and based on our early testing, we found that to have any chance of boosting student learning of core statistics and data concepts, we needed to tailor our supports and materials for this context. Largely due to this focus, only two social studies teachers felt they could teach one of our modules (the one on immigration to the U.S.) in their social studies classes. One of these teachers used the module largely as-is. She observed her partner statistics teacher using the module before she launched it herself, and the two may have consulted on implementation strategies (they were teaching different grade levels and different students). Another teacher modified the lessons greatly because the heavy quantitative emphasis in the materials didn't align with his teaching goals.

    Our project couldn't break down departmental silos in schools themselves, but we provided teachers from different departments within schools opportunities to come and talk together about common learning goals and strategies that cross disciplines. In our future work, we would love to work more in this space, and especially to see what is possible in supporting more quantitative thinking within social studies learning.

     
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    Satabdi Basu
  • Icon for: Mark Guzdial

    Mark Guzdial

    Researcher
    May 18, 2021 | 09:23 a.m.

    Hi Josephine,

    Cool project! Thanks for sharing your video.

    We found that CODAP was a real concern for our social studies teachers. They felt that it was too complicated for the few graphs that social studies teachers will use in a give semester -- the return on investment wasn't high enough.  We had a paper at SITE 2021 on this story, which I described in this blog post.

     

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 18, 2021 | 04:49 p.m.

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for watching our video! It's very interesting what you've been finding with social studies teachers. When we began developing our materials, we worked with paired mathematics and social studies teachers, and the latter were all interested in bringing in more quantitative data analysis into their courses. Both sets of teachers had a small learning curve with CODAP (many mathematics teachers have never worked with data!), but both sets of teachers ultimately found CODAP easy and fun to use to explore data.

    It is true that in our initial iteration of classroom testing of our materials, only one social studies teacher implemented one module fully -- but we think this was largely because our project goals are to promote statistical thinking and data analysis practices within non-AP mathematics classes, so the focus of our materials is more quantitative than most social studies teachers will feel is aligned with their curriculum goals. But as we explore bringing our work to more social studies teachers, we will continue to start with the social issues and topics that are aligned with social studies standards and courses and help bring quantitative skills and tools to bear to understand the issues. We don't focus heavily on computational thinking skills or programming -- instead we focus on the overlap of the 4-step statistical data investigation process with the 4-step social studies Inquiry Arc and support teachers and students who want to use quantitative data and statistical thinking in their history (or economics or civics) investigations. We've been exploring these ideas with teachers in Massachusetts and there is interest -- although we'll need to find out how far the interest goes!

  • Icon for: Andee Rubin

    Andee Rubin

    Researcher
    May 11, 2021 | 01:13 p.m.

    Jo -

    As you know, I love your project and it's been a real honor to be working with you these last few years as an advisor.  I think the addition of the census microdata portal to CODAP is a very important outcome of this project and I hope that more projects find and use it in their work.  Could you comment on where you would/might go next with additional materials?  What topic or data would you use for a third module if you had the resources?

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 11, 2021 | 01:57 p.m.

    Andee-- We have been so lucky to have you serve as the chair of our advisory board, and we have learned so much from you throughout our project. 

    For our third module we always wanted to bring in real data and a compelling social justice context to have students explore associations among quantitative variables, i.e., bring in the concepts of correlation and linear regression when looking at two variables, and then examine interaction effects with a third variable. The ACS and decennial census data didn't provide us with many person-level variables that are both quantitative and set up compelling social justice questions (e.g., how income varies by age and by other third variables might be of interest to some, but there aren't many more quantitative variables to choose from).

    We therefore started to explore person-level health data that are publicly available, but it is interesting that many health variables in the datasets we looked at are categorical rather than quantitative (e.g., more variables indicating incidence of health conditions rather than levels of specific conditions). We also had to stop pursuing a third module due to COVID disruptions and the need to pivot to helping our teachers test our materials in remote/hybrid environments.

    In the future, we may need to move away from person-level data in order to explore associations among quantitative variables with authentic social justice questions. Some ideas include looking at the neighborhood or census tract as the unit of analysis, so we can explore associations between poverty levels and area racial composition, for example, or housing prices by percentage of immigrants in the population. But as you know, working with rates is hard for students. This is an area prime for more exploration and research -- because these issues are real and meaningful for all of us!

  • Icon for: Laura Larkin

    Laura Larkin

    Facilitator
    Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow
    May 11, 2021 | 04:35 p.m.

    Hi Josephine-

    These topics are definitely of interest to my high school students and I appreciate the interdisciplinary collaboration.  I could envision an entire school-wide theme for either one of these with tie-ins to English, social studies, world languages, math, art, and environmental science.  What sort of prior knowledge is needed by students to successfully navigate the modules?  

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 01:15 a.m.

    Hi Laura,

    Thanks for your interest, and your question! Our modules, designed for high school grade levels (primarily 12th grade), expect that students will have been exposed to statistics and data concepts addressed in 6th through 8th-grade standards from the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. However, we have found that students in the classes we have been serving don't necessarily have a deep understanding of these concepts. So our materials help to deepen (and sometimes re-build) students' understanding of these concepts through our applied data investigations. Our materials can also be used by teachers to help students learn concepts targeted in the high school mathematics standards (e.g., conditional proportions).

    For example, students develop a stronger understanding of the difference between the mean and median and how they are (or are not) affected by skewed data (as seen in U.S. incomes). They deepen and/or build an understanding of conditional proportions by predicting and then investigating, for example, the region of the U.S. with the highest percentage of people who are immigrants, versus the region of the U.S. where the highest percentage of immigrants have settled.

    We don't expect students to come with specific prior content knowledge about the social studies content of our modules. Instead, we provide online resources and handouts to support students' understanding of and interpretations of their data findings. But we hope that if students have already studied U.S. immigration history in their U.S. history class, for example, then our materials will give them an opportunity apply that knowledge to their data interpretations.

    It's exciting that your school may be interested in promoting more interdisciplinary studies. In at least two of the high schools we've worked with, the principals and the teachers had either already moved or were trying to move their curricula in this direction. A principal at one of our collaborating schools observed students giving presentations on their final data projects from one of our modules and was excited by the possibilities of using the project as a model for a senior capstone activity. But we know how hard it is to build interdisciplinary collaboration in high school settings. Are you aware of a prior NSF-funded project, called Thinking with Data, that was led about 10 years ago by Phil Vahey at SRI? They built an 8-week curriculum involving social studies, mathematics, science, and ELA teachers in middle school focused on a shared environmental theme. Their findings about their successes and challenges might be helpful and informative for you.

  • Icon for: Lauren Goff

    Lauren Goff

    K-12 Teacher
    May 12, 2021 | 10:40 a.m.

    What an essential conversation and study to be having now. I love that you specifically targeted non-AP classes as well. Well done! Looking forward to learning more about this project.

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 02:07 p.m.

    Hi Lauren,

    Thanks for checking out our video! I just checked out your video, and the work you are doing for your ITEST project looks very exciting and important. As a team, we have thought about how valuable it would be for students using our modules to interact with data scientists who look like them -- just as you do in your project. This is something we are contemplating for future work. =) If you have specific questions about our project we'd be happy to answer.

  • Icon for: Ashley Wall

    Ashley Wall

    K-12 Teacher
    May 12, 2021 | 01:05 p.m.

    What a great project! Making statistics directly applicable to students on the local level is so important for giving them agency in their school, communities, and beyond. The modules seem to make the data accessible and user-friendly. I would definitely use this in my classroom.

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 05:37 p.m.

    Hi Ashley - Thanks for viewing our video and for your comments! I took a quick peek at yours and it's exciting to see how you've been working with high school students to give them real research experiences. Our spirits are aligned! 

    Yes, we worked hard to make U.S. census and ACS data accessible for students, and CODAP tools are very student-friendly (with a low threshold and high ceiling for data exploration possibilities). A comment that one student gave us in a post-module survey was how the module helped them feel like a real analyst doing the work that real statisticians do.

    In each of our modules, we provide sequenced lessons that build students' comfort with using CODAP and conducting data investigations (moving through the four steps of the data investigation process). By the end of the module, they can more independently conduct a final data investigation that explores in greater depth a question of their own choosing -- either about income inequality among different social groups, or a claim about immigrants.

  • Icon for: Liandra Larsen

    Liandra Larsen

    Graduate Student
    May 12, 2021 | 01:26 p.m.

    What an incredible project! I love that your team didn't shy away from social injustices and instead found a way to discuss it through STEM. As a graduate student, I would have loved to learn about statistics in a way that felt relevant to my life as a marginalized person. Really cool stuff - congratulations on this!

     
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    Kimberly Elliott
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 06:09 p.m.

    Hi Liandra-- Thanks for viewing our video, and for your comments! (I just viewed your project video and was inspired, by the way!)

    I have to admit that I myself was never interested in statistics until I went to grad school to learn about social and policy issues that I cared about, and then learned statistics to better understand and analyze these issues. Many of the issues I cared (and still greatly care) about deal with race, socioeconomic inequality, and immigration -- given my own background as a visible minority and an immigrant myself. Knowing that adolescence is a critical time of identity development, it made sense to ask: Wouldn't students in high school be interested in looking at data that gives them information about themselves and their families and communities within broader U.S. society? Particularly if you're from a group that has historically experienced differential (and unequal) treatment? This was a motivation and hypothesis driving our project: Can we hook broader student populations and draw them toward statistical and data science work, by tapping into natural interests and concerns about their own places and opportunities within society?

     
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    Liandra Larsen
  • Icon for: Liandra Larsen

    Liandra Larsen

    Graduate Student
    May 12, 2021 | 06:15 p.m.

    Thank you! We both felt inspired after viewing each other's videos!

    But wow - yes. All of these questions are spot on. You all have inspired me to revisit quantitative research because of the questions we can answer and areas of interest we can shed light on through statistics. Feel free to keep in touch! lalarsen@cougarnet.uh.edu

  • Icon for: Michael Belcher

    Michael Belcher

    Researcher
    May 12, 2021 | 04:53 p.m.

    This seems like a really great project! I love the topics for your two modules and your use of CODAP. Do your materials include supports, either for teachers or students, for acting on their findings from their data explorations? That is, once students have a sense of the scope of income inequality, for example, what happens next? Do they feel inspired to start advocating for change? Thanks for sharing your video! I think this is really great work and I would love to teach with something like this!

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 12, 2021 | 11:56 p.m.

    Thanks for visiting our site and for your great questions! When we first began developing our materials, we worked with both mathematics and social studies teachers to think about what types of social action students might want to take in response to the issues they were uncovering, and what types of civic activities teachers would want to support students in pursuing. Many of our social studies teacher collaborators were already conducting lessons with social action plans as part of their regular curriculum and student learning goals. Example activities that they described included students writing letters to local Congress representatives, as well as students researching and evaluating social change efforts launched by local community organizations.

    Because we focused our module testing in mathematics and statistics classroom contexts, we followed the lead of partner teachers in these spaces. Although several of these teachers expressed interest in supporting students to follow their data investigations with civic action, none of them had the space or time to pursue these activities. Some mathematics teachers admitted that they needed more support in facilitating conversations around what can be challenging conversations about social issues in their classrooms. We provide resources from a variety of well-respected organizations on how to set classroom norms and facilitate these types of conversations, but this is an area that deserves its own dedicated focus. We are still very interested in working with teachers and in settings where there is flexibility in the curriculum to encourage interdisciplinary data projects that include civic-oriented action plans as a final component.

  • Icon for: Bridina Lemmer

    Bridina Lemmer

    Facilitator
    Technical Assistance Consultant
    May 12, 2021 | 09:36 p.m.

    I loved learning about this project! Do you have any plans to expand into integrating modules with high school science or STEM classes? I see a lot of potential overlaps there and I think there would be a lot of interest in that integration! 

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 15, 2021 | 11:42 a.m.

    Thanks, Bridina, for your question! (I think I failed earlier to reply directly to you, so I'm reposting my earlier response.) These are great ideas. We've been focused most on possibilities for integrating our modules in high school social studies classes so we haven't been thinking quite as much of science classes. But there are certainly many topics that could lend themselves well to investigation in public health or earth science classes, just to name a couple of contexts (e.g., examining disparities in health care outcomes by race and income, or the unequal impacts of climate change on community living conditions and other environmental justice issues). There are so many possibilities, which I'll bet other groups in the current and past showcases have already been exploring (and I hope to carve out time to find them!).

  • Icon for: James Callahan

    James Callahan

    Informal Educator
    May 13, 2021 | 01:47 p.m.

    We're most definitely taking note of this very important video and program.  And from many angles.

    I certainly am recommending this to my colleagues in the CLEAN Network, educators with a focus on climate change and climate action.  Also to the staff at CLEAN, as your program and CLEAN have very much in common providing outstanding, vetted resource collections. Cleannet.org

    Further, I would love to connect with the appropriate people on your team -- or colleagues in your network.  I was already looking to see if you have this on your radar, when I read your comment of May 13 at 12:14am.

    We have a good amount of statistical data that aligns the unequal impact of climate change with systemic racism and community living conditions.  The two are so closely intertwined.  Still, seeing the statistics juxtaposed can be shocking and quite moving.

    For instance, in California, which rightly prides itself as a state leader on climate (it is also my home state)... the differences between living conditions can be incredibly stark, between rich and poor and White and people of color.  Strongly correlated with this is percent of Tree Canopy, which is well analyzed statistically.  New reports continue to be released, with detailed statistics.  Side by side are communities -- some overwhelming White and wealthy, right next door with neighborhoods that are predominately African American and Latina/Latino.   The former communities are lush with tree canopy.  The latter have some of the lowest percentages on tree canopy in the state.  The latter are largely asphalt and concrete. High asthma rates. In some cases, trees continue to be removed by the cities at a shocking rate, even while receiving State grants which are supposed to be greening the state.  This only can happen when the reality is hidden from view.    

    Although the State of California has funded programs with millions of dollars with Cap and Trade funding with the explicit focus on both: increasing tree canopy and addressing equity and discrimination; the money gets diverted to going in the opposite direction.

    The statistics are right there, produced by reputable sources.  Yet they get buried.  They are kept from the public; certainly they are not discussed in the schools.

    Would such data on such a topic be something your program and your students could run with?

    If so, you would have the support of climate educators and many community social justice programs.  Our forte is not communicating with statistics.  (Hands-on STEM is our program's for instance.)

    If so, we would be very glad to share and do our part.  Work like yours is so very important.

     
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    James Callahan
  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 15, 2021 | 11:44 a.m.

    Hi James, (I think I failed to reply directly to you in my earlier response, so I'm reposting here)

    Thanks so much for viewing our video and connecting with us! It would be great to get together and talk. Just to let you know, a couple of us on this project work on another data literacy project, also funded by NSF, through its ITEST program. It's called WeatherX, and you can find more information about this project both at http://stelar.edc.org/projects/22767/profile/understanding-weather-extremes-big-data-inspiring-rural-youth-data-science as well as through http://oceansofdata.org/k16-projects. Anne Gold, one of your CLEAN collaborators, is an advisor for WeatherX! We aim to have a video for this project next year.

    As we shared in our current video, the Strengthening Data Literacy across the Curriculum (SDLC) project has been serving high school students from historically marginalized groups (primarily Blacks and Latinos/as) and explicitly incorporates questions about social and economic inequality in the U.S. for students to investigate with data.  In contrast, our WeatherX project focuses on building data analysis practices and career interests in data science among rural middle school students with learning experiences that involve investigation of local extreme weather events. Using CODAP, students analyze current and historical data from one of our partners, the Mount Washington Observatory, as well as NOAA/the NCEI. Although we have not incorporated a social justice angle into current WeatherX curriculum units in the same way that we have done for the SDLC project, your comments encourage us to move in this direction as we think about how to develop our work further. If you have datasets that would allow students to examine disparate impacts of climate change and extreme weather on different communities (especially in rural areas of the Northeast), we would love to collaborate!

     
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    James Callahan
  • Icon for: James Callahan

    James Callahan

    Informal Educator
    May 18, 2021 | 07:29 p.m.

    Josephine,

    I will definitely follow up.  Connecting. And exploring the possibilities with WeatherX.  I'll be sure to check in with the ever incredible Anne Gold.  I am noting all.

    Thank you!

     
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    James Callahan
  • Icon for: Alexandra Puritz

    Alexandra Puritz

    Exploration Education Program Manager
    May 14, 2021 | 10:00 a.m.

    What a neat way to engage students with data on important topics!

  • Icon for: Emily Fagan

    Emily Fagan

    Co-Presenter
    Non Profit
    May 14, 2021 | 10:36 a.m.

    Thank you for watching and for sharing this post, Alexandra! We are seeing good student engagement and increased interest in statistics learning because students describe the context as relevant to them and to their lives. I can see that your project is similar in that you are engaging students in very relevant science content. It's impressive how responsive your team has been in shifting gears to provide meaningful PD for teachers that includes engaging and important science activities for them to use remotely. I can see that PD delivered in this format will continue to be powerful. I love it! 

  • Icon for: Kristen Malzahn

    Kristen Malzahn

    Researcher
    May 14, 2021 | 12:54 p.m.

    The work you've done sounds amazing and I love the focus on social justice issues -- so relevant and so important.  Well done and congratulations.  Can't wait to hear more about your work in the future. 

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 15, 2021 | 11:04 a.m.

    Kristen -- thanks for watching our video and for your encouraging words!  As we do our research, I try to ask myself the sharp yet supportive questions that you, folks at Horizon Research, and other great researchers like you might ask us to keep us on our toes! =) 

  • Icon for: David Barnes

    David Barnes

    Facilitator
    Associate Executive Director, NCTM
    May 14, 2021 | 05:17 p.m.

    There are so many things I like about this project, what it does, what it offers, how it connects to real data and the interrogation of real questions students are thinking about or statements they are hearing.

    I know a growing number of states are working to create a common pathway for students that lead to a range of choices in grade 12 or 11 and 12.  Have been connected with any of those projects and offered your extensive work as a model for course offerings?  If so can you talk about how that has been received and reception from states?  Quality statistics education and understanding does provide increased opportunities for students leaving high school.

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 15, 2021 | 11:37 a.m.

    Hi David,

    Thanks so much for visiting our site, your supportive comments, and your interesting questions. We are aware of growing interest around the country about mathematics pathways through high school that provide alternatives to the traditional algebra/geometry-->calculus trajectory. In fact, we found great interest in our materials in Massachusetts among high school math department heads and teachers developing options for students in grade 12 who must take a fourth year of mathematics but are not interested in or on track to take calculus or AP statistics. We have also heard from mathematics teachers and department heads in the Boston area who wish to teach data analysis and statistics concepts in 9th and 10th grades in ways that make the learning relevant to students' lives and build understanding of social justice issues.

    We have not yet tried to reach out more widely to geographic regions beyond the Boston region (where we have focused our early-stage project's development and testing efforts), nor have we (yet) connected with other projects or organizations that are working systematically on alternative mathematics pathways in high school. But we are very interested in making these connections, and would welcome ideas for promising contacts!

  • Icon for: David Barnes

    David Barnes

    Facilitator
    Associate Executive Director, NCTM
    May 16, 2021 | 03:07 p.m.

    Thanks Josephine.  The Dana Center in partnership with CBMS has a project that engages a number of states that are looking at the common pathway leading to a range of courses to assist students in future endeavors.  I also work with a project in Virginia - Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI) and this includes a stats option.  Feel free to reach out ot me at dbarnes@nctm.org if you would like to connect with the group working at that level.

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 17, 2021 | 06:17 p.m.

    Thanks, David -- this is very helpful information!

  • Icon for: Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein

    Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein

    Researcher
    May 17, 2021 | 09:00 p.m.

    This is so exciting - I always love projects that tap into students' interest and curiosity to get them to learn data and research skills. And I'm curious: how much do students dive into criticizing what's absent from the data, or unanswerable with it?

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 17, 2021 | 11:25 p.m.

    Thanks for your question, Jena! We begin each of our modules with an early lesson in which students critically examine our primary data sources - the U.S. decennial census and the American Community Survey. They read about their history, how they are collected, and importantly - they do activities where they examine the survey questions themselves and consider how easy or hard it would be to answer different questions. Students discuss what would happen to the data and the conclusions people can draw if people don't respond honestly, or if they don't feel comfortable answering and therefore generate missing data (e.g., how comfortable are people reporting their incomes? how comfortable are immigrants sharing any information with people they don't know?). In addition, a very important discussion early in each module is when students discuss what kinds of questions can be answered by data and what kinds of questions cannot. We feel these are fundamental elements of building data literacy, before students begin assembling their data extracts, choosing variables, and analyzing data to address the driving questions of each data investigation.

  • Icon for: Heidi Larson

    Heidi Larson

    Project Director
    May 18, 2021 | 04:05 p.m.

    Sounds like an excellent project! I'd like to have access to a portal myself, after recently exploring census data for another project. What are your thoughts for disseminating these modules further, to get them into more schools? 

  • Icon for: Josephine Louie

    Josephine Louie

    Lead Presenter
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 18, 2021 | 05:05 p.m.

    Hi Heidi,

    Thanks for watching our video! Very glad you asked about our microdata portal to U.S. Census and ACS data, because it's available to the public right now! Anyone can go to https://codap.concord.org/, explore the page and existing datasets or go right to "Try CODAP," and in the upper left toolbar, you'll find an icon for "Plugins." You can then select "Microdata Portal" and it will bring you to the portal that The Concord Consortium designed for our project (but is available to the world). Through this plugin you can create data extracts from the decennial census or the ACS, using data from select decades and years from 1850-2017. Our project developed a detailed data codebook for students, but general variable/attribute definitions are also available directly within the portal.

    Because ours is an early-stage research and development project, we have focused primarily on studying and refining our materials and student learning and interest, rather than creating products for mass distribution. But people have been reaching out to us and we are happy to help. Our goals for the future are to develop more materials, test for true efficacy, and to explore more widespread scaling. We are in the final year of our project so we are definitely thinking about next steps!

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