Find and Organize Data

Ask Questions & Consider Outcomes    

Data are observations and measurements collected systematically in a context and for a reason. Questions drive the process of working with data; they may precede or follow data collection. Asking new questions and revising old ones, when needed, are part of what drives the process of inquiry.

Here are some resources to help your students gain these skills: 

• Making testable questions with data: ADVizE mini-lecture: As part of a series, we explore what a testable question is and how we can work to create testable questions to answer with data.
• Dataspire: What to Ask ($):  Engage your students in grade-level meaningful discussions and deeper thinking around data. Designed to support scaffolding data investigations across your existing curriculum or inspire new lesson development to advance K-12 learning. Choose all grades or from the 3 grades bands depending on your focus.

Generate Data   

Investigations are designed to address a particular question or purpose. They are designed to collect samples in a way that reasonably represents a whole population or phenomenon. And then, measurements that are made and recorded systematically, according to a plan, are more likely to produce a repeatable (and thus more convincing) result. 

Here are some resources to help your students gain these skills: 

• Finding authentic and relevant data to use: Here is a list of some great dataset and data activity repositories that are specifically curated and developed for educational audiences. We have organized them by content topics.
• Dataspire: Data in Real Life: a quick reference doc with links to keep handy for when you need it!
• What are data?: ADVizE mini-lecture: As part of a series, we explore what we mean by data and the difference between data and information.
• Types of data & why use them: ADVizE mini-lecture: As part of a series, we explore the different ways we talk about "types of data" and dive into thinking more consciously about what kinds of data we use when in our teaching.
• Data literacy 101: What do we really mean by "data"? (Sep 2019): NSTA Science Scope article about the different ways we talk about data and how they are used differently.

Quantify Data     

When we work with data, we have cases, values, attributes/variables, units, and scale in our datasets. Knowing what these are and how to work with them is an important part of working with data. Also, keeping a consistent approach to these aspects sets you up for success when exploring and inferring meaning from data.

Here are some resources to help your students gain these skills: 

• stay tuned!

Organize Data     

Tables (hand drawn and digital spreadsheets) organize measurement values into cells, according to attributes (columns) and cases (rows). A table designed for data collection may be structured differently than a table designed for data visualization and analysis, therefore a table can and should be reorganized according to its purpose. 

Here are some resources to help your students gain these skills: 

• Organizing Data to Explore It: An important component of working with data is determining how to organize it in ways that can help us explore it and create data visualizations from the data (long and tidy? or wide?)
• Organizing Data: ADVizE mini-lecture:  As part of a series, we explore how to create Data Tables and leverage our Spreadsheets to help us collect data, explore our data, and share our data numerically once we have interpreted it.
• Data Literacy 101: How Can We Better Move From Data to Meaning? (Jan/Feb 2021): NSTA Science Scope article about the multiple steps that happen for words and numbers of raw data to come together to help us answer our testable questions. A key initial step, which is often skipped for a variety of reasons, is getting the data ready to analyze. What are those steps?

 General Resources

There are also a range of resources related to Finding & Organizing Data in our list of more General Resources:

• 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.