Perceptions of Data Among Middle School Students: An Exploratory Study (Poster 4)

• In Event: Exploring Critical Data Literacy in K–12 Social Studies

Abstract

Introduction and Project Description:
The enormous amounts of data made possible by the rapid expansion of computation power necessitate the development of a generation of data-literate citizens who are knowledgeable and capable of working with data to make informed decisions in work and everyday lives (National Academies, 2023). Further, it is imperative to include issues of ethics within the context of data literacy (Wolff et al., 2016) since data in their collection, analysis, and dissemination are not neutral but rather laden with values of those that hold power and ripe of systemic historical injustices (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020).
In this poster, we share our analysis from 34 interviews conducted prior to a 2-week environmental justice-focused project in 8th-grade science classrooms. The interviewees were students from two middle schools in a semi-urban area in the northeastern part of the US. While the project focused on students building and programming table-top automated greenhouses to control environmental conditions to grow plants, in the pre-interviews, we were interested in understanding the initial perspectives students had about data and the use of data for decision-making, before they used data to work on the subsequent tasks in the project.
In this poster we share our findings to answer the questions: (i) What are middle schoolers’ conceptions of data? (ii) In what contexts do middle schoolers think data can be used for decision-making? Using a thematic analysis approach, we analyzed student responses to two questions among other pre-interview questions - one question elicited students’ understanding of the word “data” while the second question prompted them to think of real-life examples of using data for decision-making.
Results:
Our preliminary analysis suggests that students associated the term “data” with concepts including information, numbers, evidence, answers to questions, statistics, graphs, charts, digital storage, or cellular data. Secondly, when asked about examples of using data for decision-making, they shared a breadth of contexts from their daily or personal lives, their projects, and content from their mathematics and science classes. For example, students gave examples of their Civics projects where they used survey data collected from students in lower grades about things to be incorporated for them in their future classes. However, a few students (n = 4) could not articulate what they understood by the word “data” and about 10 students could not think of specific examples or were uncertain about how data could be used for decision-making.
It is interesting to note that students had varied conceptions of data and the contexts it could be used in, particularly outside of traditional STEM contexts. While in the following 2-week camp, the students used data collected from the various environmental sensors to make decisions about the design of their greenhouses (e.g., the number of fans used, the position of installing the grow lights, etc.), we utilized our findings from this study to inform the design of a youth action research project (being implemented in August 2023) where students will collect their data to solve problems for their environment or make decisions related to their issues.

Authors

• Jaai Uday Phatak, Boston College

• Avneet Hira, Boston College

• Helen Zhang, Boston College

• Sheikh Ahmad Shah, Boston College

• Michael Barnett, Boston College