Overview
Key Considerations
Lessons
Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to...
- pose questions that can be addressed with data
- organize data to make sense of large, messy, real-world datasets
- connect patterns and trends in data to understanding of ocean warming, lobsters, and black sea bass to form evidence and reasoning based claims
Time Estimate
4 to 10 class periods
Audience
5-8
Learning Space
Classroom
Standards Alignment
Data challenges can be submitted for publication to Findings from the Field. For more information on submission, peer review, and publication, go to the Resources for Educators page on the Findings website.
Posing Questions
Explore the suggested sequence in the teacher's guide. Choose a strategy for regularly collecting, revisiting, and revising questions throughout the data challenge sequence. Begin by generating a list of questions based on students’ existing knowledge and curiosity, and return to these lists regularly as students learn more about ticks and lyme disease, investigate the dataset for the data challenge, and begin to form claims.
Building Background Knowledge
Use the Ocean Warming curriculum module to support students in building background knowledge to support understanding of the data and identifying trends. Feel free to replace or supplement with your own resources!
Developing Skills with Data Analysis Tools
Give one class period to develop familiarity with the CODAP platform before working to interpret the data. CODAP is a free data analysis platform. Choose between the resources offered below to build student comfort. If you see student comfort with CODAP as a barrier to engaging in the Data Challenge, we have also tee’d up the dataset with some pre-made graphs. Students make sense of these graphs and contribute thinking to the Data Challenge without experience using CODAP. Reach out to GMRI for other modification ideas and supports.
About CODAP | CODAP tutorials for students: Getting Started in CODAP, Part 1, Getting Started in CODAP, Part 2 | CODAP challenge cards
Working with the Data
Share the data with students, and give them time to look for patterns and relationships. Share the CODAP link as it is, modify or add to the tee’d up graphs and create a new link to share with your class, or share this presentation of data visualizations created from the dataset (or create a new set of slides of your own) You might have different groups of students work with different graphs and invite the class to synthesize learning across groups. Modify to best meet your needs and best support your students.
Lobster and Black Sea Bass Dataset | Slides with Premade Graphs | Guide to sharing a CODAP document
Drafting the Data Challenge
Data challenge submissions will be assessed using the rubric linked below. Submissions should include:
- A section about the question being posed
- At least one data visualization
- A claim section
- Total maximum of 350 words
Data challenge submissions may be drafted as a collaborative effort by an entire class, in groups, or individually.
Participating in the Broader Scientific Community
Students will submit their work and participate in cross-school peer review through the Findings from the Field website, where you can find detailed information for teachers and students. If you have questions about this process, reach out to Steve at [email protected]
Findings Website |Resources for Educators | Resources for Students