This report characterizes forms of dialogic support that a sixth-grade teacher generated during whole-class and small-group conversations to help students develop a practice of statistical modeling. During four weeks of instruction, students constructed and revised models to account for variability and uncertainty across a variety of random…

When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to "mechanistically" explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and "conceptually" connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing…

The importance of data literacies and the shortage of research surrounding data science in elementary schools motivated this research-practice partnership (RPP) between researchers and teachers from a STEM elementary school. We used a narrative case study methodology to describe the instructional practices of one music teacher who co-designed a…

Purpose: This study is part of a participatory design research project and aims to develop and study pedagogical frameworks and tools for integrating computational thinking (CT) concepts and data science practices into elementary school classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This paper describes a pedagogical approach that uses a data science…

Statistical literacy is a skill that will be required by all students, but only limited insights exist into how it can be developed in middle schools. Research is required that identifies design principles and provides didactic materials for developing statistical literacy in actual middle school classrooms, meaning classrooms in which statistics…

The poor level of engagement in learning mathematics is primarily caused by ineffective methods of instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how context-based problem-posing and solving instructional approaches influence students' engagement in learning data handling using a concurrent embedded quasi-experimental…

This study examines the use of data analytics to evaluate students' behaviours during their participation in an online collaborative learning environment called SkyApp. To visualise the learning traits of engagement, emotion and motivation, students' inputs and activity data were captured and quantified for analysis. Experiments were first carried…

Probabilistic reasoning underpins much of middle school students' future work in data analysis and inferential statistics. Unfortunately for many middle school students, probabilistic reasoning is not intuitive. One specific area in which students seem to struggle is determining the probability of compound events (Moritz and Watson 2000). Research…

Have you ever noticed trash collecting in streams or waterways? How does trash influence our environment, and what can be done to enact change? These are questions middle school students explored as the authors launched the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) task. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch activity involves an urgent environmental issue that…

The Fluid Earth (FE) is an interactive data visualization initially developed for learning about Earth's atmosphere in informal educational settings. In this study, we tested FE in middle school classes to assess student engagement in a formal educational setting. Using a quasi-experimental design, students were assigned to interact with the data…

The main purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual understanding of the irrational number of the square root of 2 ([square root]2 ). Participants in the study were 20 ninth-grade male students. Activity Theory was used as a framework to show the development of the conceptual understanding. Since this study was conducted during the COVID-19…

This manuscript focuses on the role of data analytics in mediating how teachers make sense of racial and gender inequity in patterns of student participation in their classrooms. Five middle school mathematics teachers participated in a year-long professional development program, centered on data analytics generated by the EQUIP observation tool.…

Data science surrounds us in contexts as diverse as climate change, air pollution, route-finding, genomics, market manipulation, and movie recommendations. To open the "data-science-black-box" for lower secondary school students, we developed a data science teaching unit focusing on the analysis of environmental data, which we embedded…

This paper contributes a theoretical framework informed by historical, philosophical and ethnographic studies of science practice to argue that data should be considered to be actively produced, rather than passively collected. We further argue that traditional school science laboratory investigations misconstrue the nature of data and overly…

Integrating engineering design into K-12 curricula is increasingly important as engineering has been incorporated into many STEM education standards. However, the ill-structured and open-ended nature of engineering design makes it difficult for an instructor to keep track of the design processes of all students simultaneously and provide…