Researchers at UMass Amherst Use ‘TinkerPlots’ to Teach Data Literacy to Middle and Grade School Students
Nov. 24, 2009
| Contact: | Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. – Increasingly, groups and institutions are being held accountable based on performance data, whether it’s teachers judged by student test scores or quarterbacks by passing statistics. To keep up, people must learn to interpret what the numbers mean, a skill that Cliff Konold and Craig Miller of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Scientific Reasoning Research Institute (SRRI) call “data literacy.”
As Konold points out, “The health care debate is driven by interpretations of data, as is the debate about global warming. It’s a new world, and today’s young people need to learn to think in new ways and cultivate skills that allow them to understand and make sound arguments based on data.”
He and Miller are now developing the third version of their educational software tool, TinkerPlots, which is used to teach data literacy to students in grades 5 to 8. They recently received a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop this new version, which will build on students’ interest in computer games. Their overall goal is to use computer-based data sets and real-life activities to improve student skills in interpreting and analyzing statistical information.
In our data-rich world, understanding how to discriminate between meaningful data and bias, for example, is as critical as knowing how to read or count, Konold says. He and Miller designed TinkerPlots to give students a powerful data visualization tool that can help make data analysis exciting and fun to learn.
A psychologist by training, Konold is an expert in how we think about and learn probability, statistics and data analysis. Several years ago, he teamed up with senior software engineer and graphic/animation designer Craig Miller to design the educational program. A powerful strength of the TinkerPlots latest approach, they point out, is that it takes advantage of the fact that as kids “play,” they continually try to improve their scores by changing strategies.
“The games will be designed so that these cycles also lead to an improved understanding of specific data modeling and/or mathematics concepts,” Konold adds. Among other things, he and Miller are learning how students view data, what data structures are appropriate to introduce in middle and high school, how student interpretations and interactions with data change as a function of data set size.
For maximum student fun and engagement, TinkerPlots poses kid-relevant questions. For example, based on backpack weight, can sixth-graders make a case that they get too much homework? To begin, students construct a data set—in this case, they collect data about classmates including the weight of students and their backpack—then plot data to answer questions about whether students in higher grades carry heavier loads. “Textbooks don’t teach this,” Miller notes, “But we’ve found that using a computer-based approach is a natural for encouraging students to build data sets that they’re truly interested in, or that seem like a game to them. It makes it easier for them to think in statistically sophisticated ways.”
The first two versions of TinkerPlots were developed between 2000 and 2009 and tested among school children at Chestnut Hill Elementary, Fort River and Lynch Middle School in nearby Holyoke. TinkerPlots, which is published by Key Curriculum Press, is currently used by school children around the world, from the United States and Canada to Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Israel and Russia. It is also used in other contexts, including in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston.
The new third version now being developed will be tested in local schools starting in Spring 2010, say Miller and Konold. “Students playing computer games generate large quantities of rich, interesting, highly variable data that mostly evaporates into the ether when the game ends. We want to capture some of that and bolster data literacy in our young people.”
A brief video clip is available to accompany this story at
http://www.umass.edu/srri/serg/projects/TinkerZeum/index.html
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