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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. 

Data science is revolutionizing academia and industry, creating a high demand for a workforce fluent in this field. While the availability of data science courses has increased recently, few curricula rigorously build on mathematical logic. The LogicDS Project addresses this gap by engaging high school students from rural communities in an online data science course integrating mathematics, statistics, and programming into a unified framework based on logic and reasoning. A one-week course, consisting of six lessons, was developed and 110 participants were recruited. Pre- and post-intervention data, along with students' LMS activity logs, were collected to analyze engagement. Results indicate that the Logic-Based framework effectively engages students from diverse backgrounds, with participants finding the course valuable for learning data science skills. Notably, entropy analysis of student activity logs correlated with other mixed methods analyses, providing insights into engaging K-12 students in data science education. 

Text provides a compelling example of unstructured data that can be used to motivate and explore classification problems. Challenges arise regarding the representation of features of text and student linkage between text representations as character strings and identification of features that embed connections with underlying phenomena. In order to observe how students reason with text data in scenarios designed to elicit certain aspects of the domain, we employed a task-based interview method using a structured protocol with six pairs of undergraduate students. Our goal was to shed light on students' understanding of text as data using a motivating task to classify headlines as “clickbait” or “news.” Three types of features (function, content, and form) surfaced, the majority from the first scenario. Our analysis of the interviews indicates that this sequence of activities engaged the participants in thinking at both the human-perception level and the computer-extraction level and conceptualizing connections between them. 

It’s critical to foster artificial intelligence (AI) literacy for high school students, the first generation to grow up surrounded by AI, to understand working mechanism of data-driven AI technologies and critically evaluate automated decisions from predictive models. While efforts have been made to engage youth in understanding AI through developing machine learning models, few provided in-depth insights into the nuanced learning processes. In this study, we examined high school students’ data modeling practices and processes. Twenty-eight students developed machine learning models with text data for classifying negative and positive reviews of ice cream stores. We identified nine data modeling practices that describe students’ processes of model exploration, development, and testing and two themes about evaluating automated decisions from data technologies. The results provide implications for designing accessible data modeling experiences for students to understand data justice as well as the role and responsibility of data modelers in creating AI technologies. 

Research focusing on the integration of computational thinking (CT) into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education started to emerge. We conducted a semi-systematic literature review on 55 empirical studies on this topic. Our findings include: (a) the majority of the studies adopted domain-general definitions of CT and a few proposed domain-specific CT definitions in STEM education; (b) the most popular instructional model was problem-based instruction, and the most popular topic contexts included game design, robotics, and computational modelling; (c) while the assessments of student learning in integrated CT and STEM education targeted different objectives with different formats, about a third of them assessed integrated CT and STEM; (d) about a quarter of the studies reported differential learning processes and outcomes between groups, but very few of them investigated how pedagogical design could improve equity. Based on the findings, suggestions for future research and practice in this field are discussed in terms of operationalizing and assessing CT in STEM contexts, instructional strategies for integrating CT in STEM, and research for broadening participation in integrated CT and STEM education.