Collaborative Research: Building students' data literacy through the co-design of curriculum by mathematics and art teachers

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The aim of this project is to enact and study a process in which middle school teachers of mathematics and visual arts co-design and teach activities that combine math and art to teach data science. Many existing efforts to promote data literacy are grounded in mathematical concepts of central tendency and variation, and typically are narrowly focused in single subject domains. Taking an art-based perspective on data science has the potential to promote student relevance, accessibility, engagement, reasoning, and meaning-making with data science. Moreover, visualization technology has advanced to a degree that the relation between the information in data and visual aesthetic can be leveraged easily. To explore the opportunity this offers, research on this project will examine how to equip teachers to develop such interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches to cultivate their students' data literacy. This exploratory project will provide support for 12 teachers during summer workshops and during the school year as these teachers implement their co-designed units in their classrooms. The work addresses the following questions: (1) How do we support effective co-design of data literacy units among art teachers, mathematics teachers, and researchers? (2) How are teachers able to use the unit materials in their classrooms to engage students in data literacy? And (3) How does an art-based approach support students' data literacy? Answers to these questions will build an understanding of how to support interdisciplinary curriculum design collaborations among researchers and teachers. They will also show how art-integrated, maker-oriented activities can support middle school learners' data literacy development; and how to design technologies that are accessible and powerful to teachers and learners in these interdisciplinary environments. Through summer workshops and year-round design collaborations, the project will iteratively design, test and refine four units for middle school classrooms, including activities, tools, and assessments, to promote students' data literacy. Data will be collected from co-design sessions as well as classroom-enactments, and will include observations, video/audio recordings, student- and teacher-generated artifacts, and pre and post assessments of students' knowledge and self-efficacy. Mixed methods analyses of these data, and syntheses of findings across participants, classroom enactments, and project years, will explore effective ways to support co-design among art teachers, mathematics teachers, and researchers; and the impact of art-integrated activities on students' data literacy. This project will reach 12 teachers and their students across 6 New York city schools. By building capacity and knowledge about how to initiate and sustain teachers' interdisciplinary curriculum collaborations, the project will have broader impact. Refined project materials, including pedagogical approaches, toolkits and adaptable classroom activities, will be disseminated to facilitate classroom adoption by other educators who wish to undertake similar art-integrated data literacy curriculum design collaborations, and will thus ultimately broaden participation in data science among diverse youth within and beyond New York City.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.