An official website of the United States government
Abstract In this study, support for teaching data literacy in social studies is provided through the design of a pedagogical support system informed by participatory design sessions with both pre‐service and in‐service social studies teachers. It provides instruction on teaching and learning data literacy in social studies, examples of standards‐based lesson plans, made‐to‐purpose data visualization tools and minimal manuals that put existing online tools in a social studies context. Based on case studies of eleven practicing teachers, this study provides insight into features of technology resources that social studies teachers find usable and useful for using data visualizations as part of standards‐ and inquiry‐based social studies instruction, teaching critical analysis of data visualizations and helping students create data visualizations with online computing tools. The final result, though, is that few of our participating teachers have yet adopted the provided resources into their own classrooms, which highlights weaknesses of the technology acceptance model for describing teacher adoption. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicData literacy is an important part of social studies education in the United States.Most teachers do not teach data literacy as a part of social studies.Teachers may adopt technology to help them teach data literacy if they think it is useful and usable.What this paper addsEducational technology can help teachers learn about data literacy in social studies.Social studies teachers want simple tools that fit with their existing curricula, give them new project ideas and help students learn difficult concepts.Making tools useful and usable does not predict adoption; context plays a large role in a social studies teachers' adoption.Implications for practice and/or policyDesigning purpose‐built tools for social studies teachers will encourage them to teach data literacy in their classes.Professional learning opportunities for teachers around data literacy should include opportunities for experimentation with tools.Teachers are not likely to use tools if they are not accompanied by lesson and project ideas.
more »
« less
Advancing Social Justice Learning Through Data Literacy
When students gain critical data literacy skills, they can analyze data in ways that help them understand power dynamics and ongoing challenges in society. Students need “critical data literacy” skills to help make sense of the multitude of information available to them, especially as it relates to high-stakes issues of social justice. The authors describe two curriculum modules they developed—one on income equality, one on immigration—that help students learn to analyze data in order to shed light on complex social issues and evaluate claims about those issues.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1813956
- PAR ID:
- 10474019
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASCD
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Educational Leadership
- ISSN:
- 2830-2591
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Data literacy, equity, instructional strategies
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In STEM learning focused on science literacy, socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. We define civic engagement as the work of influencing legitimately public matters using means within the existing political structure. In this work we investigate students’ feelings of self-efficacy for this type of civic engagement in the context of four socioscientific issues (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation). This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues. We qualitatively examined students’ response about their perception of the importance of the issue, their self-efficacy in exploring actions they could take to impact the issue, and the effectiveness of those actions. We found that students’ ideas about impact and effectiveness varied across the four different issues contexts due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. Generally, students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting. We also found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice, interpersonal and problem-solving skills and political awareness. Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence the societal system. Our course using a structured decision-making process in the context of socioscientific issues is one model to help students make these connections.more » « less
-
Engineering has historically been positioned as “objective” and “neutral” (Cech, 2014), supporting a technical/social dualism in which “hard” technical skills are valued over “soft” social skills such as empathy and team management (Faulkner, 2007). Disrupting this dualism will require us to transform the way that engineering is taught, to include the social, economic, and political aspects of engineering throughout the curriculum. One promising approach to integrating social and technical is through developing students’ critical sociotechnical literacy, supporting students in coming to “understand the intrinsic and systemic sociotechnical relationship between people, communities, and the built environment” (McGowan & Bell, 2020, p. 981). This work-in-progress study is part of a larger NSF-funded research project that explores integrating sociotechnical topics with technical content knowledge in a first-year engineering computing course. This course has previously focused on teaching students how to code, the basics of data science, and some applications to engineering. The revised course engages students in a series of sociotechnical topics, such as analyzing and interpreting data-based evidence of environmental racism. Each week, students read short articles and write reflections to prepare for in-class small group discussions. Near the end of the semester, students examined the topic of racial bias in medical equipment. Students read two popular news articles that discussed differences in accuracies of pulse oximeter readings for patients with different skin tones. We analyze students’ reflection responses for evidence of their developing sociotechnical literacy along three dimensions: (1) bias, (2) differential impact, and (3) responsibility. This exploratory case study employs thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze the students’ written reflections for this topic. Students reflected on evidence of racial bias and potential causes of bias in the device, how this bias is located in and furthers historical patterns of racism in medicine, and considered who or what might be responsible for either causing or fixing the now-known racial bias.more » « less
-
This session presents the work of two middle school humanities teachers who co-designed interdisciplinary data-infused project-based-learning modules that were implemented with their 8th grade social studies classes. The goal of this session is to share what we did with our students, how we aligned the social studies learning with an existing ELA curriculum, and our biggest takeaways from the experience. While some may question whether data is relevant in a humanities classroom, we found through this project that data literacy significantly enhanced our students' confidence and critical thinking and improved their research, problem-solving, and analytical skills, making connections between math, humanities, and the real world around them.more » « less
-
Socioscientific issues (SSI) are often used to facilitate students’ engagement in multiple scientific practices such as decision-making and argumentation, both of which are goals of STEM literacy, science literacy, and integrated STEM education. Literature often emphasizes scientific argumentation over socioscientific argumentation, which involves considering social factors in addition to scientific frameworks. Analyzing students’ socioscientific arguments may reveal how students construct such arguments and evaluate pedagogical tools supporting these skills. In this study, we examined students’ socioscientific arguments regarding three SSI on pre- and post-assessments in the context of a course emphasizing SSI-based structured decision-making. We employed critical integrative argumentation (CIA) as a theoretical and analytical framework, which integrates arguments and counterarguments with stronger arguments characterized by identifying and refuting counterarguments. We hypothesized that engaging in structured decision-making, in which students integrate multidisciplinary perspectives and consider tradeoffs of various solutions based upon valued criteria, may facilitate students’ development of integrated socioscientific arguments. Findings suggest that students’ arguments vary among SSI contexts and may relate to students’ identities and perspectives regarding the SSI. We conclude that engaging in structured decision-making regarding personally relevant SSI may foster more integrated argumentation skills, which are critical to engaging in information-laden democratic societies.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
