Our Essential Ideas
Essential Ideas offer a sense of purpose, function, and context for data tasks that students might undertake in a classroom. We can scaffold these ideas by subject-area, grade-level, across a year-long curriculum, throughout units, and within lessons. We can track student progress towards their next level of data literacy through formative and summative assessments.
We believe strongly in creating an open and inclusive approach to teaching with data. Therefore, we seek to develop and share resources to increase confidence and competence in a range of areas.
Below are some of our most commonly used and/or requested resources around Essential Ideas to integrating data literacy into current instruction. You can also search our Blog or our Essential Ideas playlist on YouTube for more ideas.
As a reminder, our free materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
UNIT / CURRICULUM SCOPING
Integrating data across units and curricula requires seeing where data naturally fits into the larger and existing flow of learning. Scoping at the curriculum level invites educators to identify opportunities where students can return to core data skills in new contexts, gradually building sophistication over time. This kind of big-picture planning highlights coherence across the year and across the student career.
Learn MoreACTIVITY / LESSON PLANNING
Designing a single activity or lesson with data is about balancing content goals with opportunities for sensemaking. At the lesson level, we want to consider how students engage with the data in ways that are authentic and appropriately challenging which necessitates choices about scaffolding and accessibility. Consider examples and strategies to adapt to different subjects and grade levels while keeping data exploration at the center.
Learn MoreASSESSING LEARNING
Assessing data literacy is more than checking for the “right” answer—it’s about making visible how they reason, interpret, and communicate using data. Prompts should capture both the process and the product: how students identify patterns, justify claims, and connect their findings to a larger context. Effective assessment offers multiple ways for students to demonstrate their understanding.
Learn MoreUnit / Curriculum Scoping Resources
Integrating data across units and curricula requires seeing where data naturally fits into the larger and existing flow of learning. Scoping at the curriculum level invites educators to identify opportunities where students can return to core data skills in new contexts, gradually building sophistication over time. This kind of big-picture planning highlights coherence. Thus resources here focus on how one unit’s focus on asking questions with data connects to another unit’s emphasis on analyzing variability, and how together they support a more complete data literacy journey.
Here are some resources to help you think about how to strategically integrate across a unit, multiple units, the year, or multiple years:
- Building Blocks: The Building Blocks for Data Literacy spreadsheet outlines "Essential Ideas" for building data literacy. It categorizes data-related activities into four "Realms": Get Data, Explore Data, Infer Meaning from Data, and Use or Build on New Knowledge. Each realm is further broken down into "Functions" and specific "Tasks," paired with corresponding "Essential Ideas" or explanations of those tasks. The table provides a conceptual framework for teaching and learning about data.
- Skills progression ADVizE mini-lecture: A short video explaining how to spread out "when we teach what" in building our students' data literacy skills.
Activity / Lesson Planning Resources
Designing a single activity or lesson with data is about balancing content goals with opportunities for sensemaking. At the lesson level, we need to consider how students will engage with the data in ways that are active, authentic, and appropriately challenging. Whether adapting an existing lesson to include a dataset or building a new activity from the ground up, planning with data invites choices about representation, scaffolding, and accessibility. Resources here showcase example lessons and strategies to adapt to different subjects and grade levels while keeping data exploration at the center.
Here are some resources to help you design new or adapt your existing activities and/or lesson plans:
- Exploratory vs. Explanatory data analysis ADVizE mini-lecture: A short video in which we explore the difference between exploratory and explanatory data analysis as well as how and why exploratory data analysis is so important in working with data.
- Example lessons: Sometimes it just takes a few tweaks to adjust a lesson that will include data or advance the data literacy skills. These blogs give some examples to get you started.
- Teaching/Instructional Strategies for Data: various instructional strategies that work well when teaching with data to practice data skills
Assessing Learning Resources
Assessment with data is more than checking whether students reached the “right” answer—it’s about making visible how they reason, interpret, and communicate using data. Assessing data learning requires prompts that capture both the process and the product: how students identify patterns, justify claims, and connect their findings to a larger context. Effective assessment offers multiple ways for students to demonstrate their understanding, from graph annotations to written explanations, and provides feedback that supports growth in data thinking over time.
Here are some resources to help you pull together or adapt your existing assessments:
- Rubrics K-2, 3-6,7-8 for Data + Graphs: What are some reasonable checkpoints students can be achieving with their data and graph skills in different grade bands? These rubrics are a good starting point to assess student learning.
General Resources
Here we have collected resources that are about a range a data related topics or are more broad in scope:
- Building Blocks for Data Literacy - Reference and discussion-starter for all educators as we all explore how to engage K-12 students with data.
- Data Literacy 101 Articles - Interdisciplinary Ideas column article for NSTA's Science Scope focused on various data strategies.
- Data Bites Series on YouTube - Weekly short videos of classroom-ready resources or strategies to try.
- Book Suggestions - Recommendations of various data, data visualization, and education books that we like and wanted to share.
- Data Across Disciplines - Data is NOT just for math or computer science class. We also need to use it in science and social studies...and can use it elsewhere.
- Others' Resources - There are so many great teams working on building lesson plans, interactive data tools, etc.
Also remember to check out our Blog for more helpful connections to the many ways you can support your students building their data literacy skills.
