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Working with existing data is central to science investigations, but students and educators have generally not had experience using existing data sets to answer their own questions. We introduce a teaching routine that makes explicit critical steps in the process of working with data to gain insight into real-world phenomena. We intend the routine to support both curriculum developers and teachers in designing and enacting lessons to support students in engaging productively with scientific data, focusing on steps that are not commonly encountered in science classes. 

A core practice of science is planning and conducting investigations. This practice needs reconceptualizing, to account for where work happens between identifying a phenomenon and designing an investigation, and between gathering and analyzing data to support developing an explanation of that phenomenon (Manz et al., 2020). Teachers, supported by curriculum materials, need to engage students in becoming more involved in the decisions related to what data to choose as evidence, how to represent data to answer specific questions, and what conclusions can be drawn from data. We present results of a design study in which students investigated a dataset to answer a question about a major change to an ecosystem, using a technology tool, CODAP. We explore how the curriculum and teacher supported students in taking up different facets of data practices that support figuring out a phenomenon while moving between investigating and developing explanatory models. 

This inquiry is guided by a curiosity around the stories that teachers tell about their students, content, and pedagogical approaches focused on data and computational literacies. We present a form of storytelling with theory as we apply theories of syncretism and translanguaging to empirical vignettes about teachers’ sensemaking. We also present a form of storytelling of theory, drawing on teachers’ stories to help us better understand how these theories are related to each other. We bring two teachers’ stories into conversation: one from the Writing Data Stories (WDS) project and the other from the Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS) project. Both projects utilized translanguaging and syncretism in their conceptions and designs, working with teachers to design for expansive forms of data-based and computational literacies.