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When conducting a science investigation in biology, chemistry, physics or earth science, students often need to obtain, organize, clean, and analyze the data in order to draw conclusions about a particular phenomenon. It can be difficult to develop lesson plans that provide detailed or explicit instructions about what students need to think about and do to develop a firm conceptual understanding, particularly regarding data analysis. This article demonstrates how computational thinking principles and data practices can be merged to develop more effective science investigation lesson plans. The data practices of creating, collecting, manipulating, visualizing, and analyzing data are merged with the computational thinking practices of decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithmic thinking, and automation to create questions for teachers and students that help them think through the underlying processes that happen with data during high school science investigations. The questions can either be used to elaborate lesson plans or embedded into lesson plans for students to consider how they are using computational thinking during their data practices in science.
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This content will become publicly available on February 25, 2026
How students learn functions in an integrated introductory data science module
According to NASEM (2018), data science has foundations in computing, mathematics, and statistics. However, at the K-12 level, these foundations are usually taught as standalone courses that are unconnected with each other. Students may struggle to see their connections. We proposed a framework unifying those foundations using mathematical logic. A core concept in mathematical logic is function. A general function has one or more possibly non-number inputs and an output. Data science motivates a comprehensive understanding of functions and provides extensive culturally relevant, real-world, and data-rich problems and applications for students to practice their understanding. It is interesting to know how well students understand functions. We developed a six-lesson online module with more than 100 in-lesson questions. Initial analysis of the students’ answers to the questions shows that students can understand the basics of the general functions but have more difficulties in involved applications of functions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2201393
- PAR ID:
- 10598213
- Publisher / Repository:
- EasyChair Preprint
- Date Published:
- Issue:
- 15867
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- functions data science education learning computer science math
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- DSE-K12 Conference, 2025, Las Vegas, NV
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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