Data, oh Data, wherefore art thou?

No I'm not going all Shakespearean on you... or (if you're a bit nerdy like I'm rumoured to be) Star Trek The Next Generation... I'm talking about the data we use for that first capability Gather and Interpret Data and then needing it for further analysis with the Use Evidence capability (and elsewhere too!).

Often in science we either think of the first capability as simply observations using our senses or we might gather some very simple data like how far a car will roll down a ramp. Particularly for our older children, grabbing hold of good data to formulate rich and robust explanations is really important. Although we can gather that data ourselves, there's plenty of places we can find some examples to use...

www.nzmaths.co.nz

The nzmaths website has the Figure it Out series and there are three that are specifically science-based (although I think there are others you can use too). Some of these have data for their own activities (which are good in themselves) but why not grab out that data and do some of your own activities with it? 

Jo Mathews, one of our University of Waikato maths facilitators, is great with the whole statistical literacy idea in science. She once brought in some data and said nothing about it... from memory, it was just a pile of numbers! She challenged us to figure out what the data were saying, what it were measuring. I really liked this idea and it could be an easy one to do yourself. Grab the weather data from the last week and take off all the measurement units. Can students start making sense of this data? If you shared the unit measurements, what does the data now say?

Matamata Piako District Council website

 Another place to go is your local council or environmental council website. The one above is from my council and is easily accessed. The fourth capability also comes into play, Interpret Representations. What do we need to know to be able to read this? Why is the information presented like this? Is it easy to read? Why or why not? What information might be missing? Remember that the author is deciding which data to show and how -might there be more going on here? I'm curious that my local council doesn't elaborate on results or action points or even share what all the terms means and if I should be worried or not!
Besides graphs, tables are useful too: 

Also Matamata Piako District Council data

Again, challenge our children -what do we think of the data? What is it showing? And not showing! 

If I'm doing a topic study on the oceans, get children to analyse data, think about it and then use it for explanations. And an extra step -could children critique theirs and each others data? Scientists do this all the time! There are some who think climate change is real and others who are challenging the gathering of the data and the interpretation of it.

So there's some ideas for data! I hope it helps! If you would like further conversations about statistical literacy or science or the capabilities, get in touch!

Paul.


FUN FACT... "data" is actually a plural word! The correct grammar is to say "The data are showing us..." and after three years of knowing this, it still sounds weird!