This project aims to engage students in meaningful scientific data collection, analysis, visualization, modeling, and interpretation. It targets grades 9-12 science instruction. The proposed research poses the question "How do learners conceive of and interact with empirical data, particularly when it has a hierarchical structure in which parameters and results are at one level and raw data at another?" As working with data becomes an integral part of students' learning across STEM curricula, understanding how students conceive of data grows ever more important. This is particularly timely as science becomes more and more data driven.
The team will develop and test a Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP). STEM curriculum development has moved online, but development of tools for students to engage in data analysis has yet to follow suit. As a result, online curriculum development projects are often forced to develop their own data analysis tools, settle for desktop tools, or do without. In a collaboration with NSF-funded projects at the Concord Consortium, Educational Development Center, and University of Minnesota, the project team is developing an online, open source data analysis platform that can be used not only by these three projects, but subsequently by others.
The proposed research breaks new ground both in questions to be investigated and in methodology. The investigations build on prior research on students' understanding of data representation, measures of center and spread, and data modeling to look more closely at students' understanding of data structures especially as they appear in real scientific situations. Collaborative design based on three disparate STEM projects will yield a flexible data analysis environment that can be adopted by additional projects in subsequent years. Such a design process increases the likelihood that CODAP will be more than a stand-alone tool, and can be meaningfully integrated into online curricula. CODAP's overarching goal is to improve the preparation of students to fully participate in an increasingly data-driven society. It proposes to do so by improving a critical piece of infrastructure: namely, access to classroom-friendly data analysis tools by curriculum developers who wish to integrate student engagement with data into content learning.
