Teaching primary learners data literacy – K. Farrell & J. Robertson | Computing education research

well uh welcome everybody um it's cold and gray here in uh in Brighton in the south of England but it's lovely and sunny at work out in Judea and Scotland um and wherever you are from lots of people from all over the world thank you for coming along I'm chairing today's seminar I'm Jane Waite I work at the Raspberry Pi Computing education Research Center and I'm very excited to welcome you to our fifth uh seminar in our new series on cater five that's primary Computing education research in this series we're focusing on Computing education for these younger Learners as children aged 5 to 11 years old and together we're going to explore how research can help us to support teachers and their students in the teaching and learning of computing oh it's my pleasure to introduce these two distinguished speakers I'm going to start with Kate I've known for quite a while um she's an incredibly experienced and accomplished Computing educational researcher she has such a wide range of experience including about data science which is what's going to be our topic for today and Kate has um she's had such an important impact on the national Computing curriculum in Scotland she's written all so many different comprehensive guides on teaching Computing science for practitioners at all levels and currently Kate is working on the data education in Schools project where she's developing well I think it's really exciting data science and data literacy resources for primary and secondary schools in Scotland and I think they should be into the Scotland England Ireland Wales and the rest of the world so joining her is uh Judy Roberts Robertson who's a professor of digital learning at the University of Edinburgh and Judy is a leading Authority on digital learning and at the academic lead for the data education in Schools project so we've just got to say a huge thank you to Judy because I think it's an area that has been woefully underrepresented in both research and in resources and Judy has been at the Forefront of developing educational technology for use with children and teachers for over two decades I know it's longer than that and her work focuses on how technology can help to solve real world problems in education and health and in their talk Katie and Judy will introduce the import importance of data literacy in primary and early years education across different curricular areas and they'll be showcasing various pedagogical approaches and I'm assuming that's going to be digital and unplugged but we'll be finding out to teaching data science and uh introducing as well I think I hope fingers crossed to a range of resources and ideas including some of their really popular live lessons which I think have been accessed by over 20 000 Learners so I'm excited because I really do think data science is one of those areas that we just have we've not really got a good grip on it it's certainly for our own my curriculum that I'm familiar with so I'm excited to learn from you guys so over to to Kate and Judy so Kate and I work at University of Edinburgh and we are going to talk to you about primary Learners as data citizens today and maybe this isn't really a term that you come across maybe you're not sure what data literacy is but I think as we explain it you kind of realized ah I call it something different with in my country or my school system so I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the project does and a little bit about what data literacy is and also the problem-solving cycle that we use to teach data literacy and then Keaton's got lots of resources and examples to share with you as well so there's a bit of kind of theory to start with and a bit of practical knowledge as well and what we do in our project um our room is working with the schools in southeast of Scotland and and primary and secondary schools and Learners aged 3 to 18. um and we started off having a look to see where data literacy might be within the Scottish curriculum to start with um and we discovered that it's embedded everywhere but it's nowhere explicitly referred to as data literacy and that's good in a way because it means within the very interdisciplinary way that primary schools are taught in Scotland that teachers can find ways to include it in lots of projects we've also got some teaching materials for Learners and which Kate will tell you a little bit about bit about and we do professional learning workshops for teachers as well um and a lot of those are face to face but sometimes we have people join us online so if you're Keen to do that you can get in touch at the end as well let's think about first of all what data literacy is the definition which we use um comes from anaka Wolf and it's the idea that data literacy is problem solving with data is the ability to ask questions and then to collect and analyze data which helps you to answer those questions but it's also about interpretation of your analysis results and really importantly there's a set of communication skills as well to let you communicate what you find out about the data and maybe persuade people that they should take some kind of action or change things as a result of the data that you've collected and mostly within our project when we're talking about data literacy we're talking on how people analyze data and we're interested in machine learning as well because we're nerds but that's more about what machines do with data and but for mostly uh when we talk about it we're talking about the sorts of skills that children would use themselves when they're doing analysis now our project has various sister projects within the southeast of Scotland which are about um working with older Learners so maybe people further education colleges or universities or people in employment and there the focus is on learning data science skills because there are good jobs there and there's a skill shortage and of course this part of what we do is about that as well we've worked on a qualification with the Scottish qualifications Authority on data science but for us it's more than just getting a job or using it in a job it's about the set of skills that you need as a citizen to thrive in kind of world that we live in just now and that might be giving the skills to find meaning and data or it might help you to understand the kind of personal data which your devices like your phone and your Fitbit and your web accounts those kind of the data which those devices um collect about you and knowing how comfortable you feel and how private you want that data to be it's also about being a critical consumer of data so knowing how to spot red flags and data that's a bit fishy or newspaper headlines are a bit dodgy um and it it increasingly cries it's about the idea of activism that if you can use data to construct arguments to give evidence from your point of view then you can use it to change the world and the biggest example I suppose the most pressing example um that young people are particularly concerned about is about climate change and we've got some local area projects about that which perhaps Kate will mention later so for us here in Scotland data literacy we know is already in the curriculum and I suspect I've seen a wide range of countries in the participants list which is lovely I suspect that probably you'll be able to find that in your own curriculum as well you'll know better than anyone else would within Technologies we've found core data literacy Concepts particularly within Computing curriculum a numeracy in maths if you look in probability and information handling you'll find it there in the English language curriculum um there's skills to do with spotting fake news and understanding how reliable sources might be sources of evidence might be is there in the science curriculum with hypothesis testing and so on and it's there in social studies if you look at things like politics or history or geography and that they those subjects use data sources as well and within the Scottish curriculum at primary level particularly teachers have got quite a lot of flexibility to weave these different areas into integrated projects in quite a good way we've also looked at various ways that you can apply data skills across the curriculum um so once you've got the skills you can use them to draw other curricular areas together so for example it might be something about food miles or physical activity it might fit in with the sustainability topic you're doing we've got some nice examples of art projects as well so once you you've developed those skills with your learners you can use them in all kinds of different ways now I made this Venn diagram because sometimes the teachers that we've worked with are not quite sure how data literacy is a term how that might fit with digital literacy which is maybe a more familiar term for for some of the teachers that we've worked with and computational thinking I expect if you come to Raspberry Pi seminars that's something you already know quite a lot about but how does that affect with data literacy so this Venn diagram shows that they're actually quite closely related and at the heart of that diagram would be an example where all of those three things come together so for example if you've used devices like micro bits or I presume Raspberry Pi's and for data handling maybe you've got temperature sensors maybe your kids are writing programs to get the data offer temperature sensors and that would count as digital and data literacy and computational thinking but then if you look at the intersection between um data literacy and computational thinking that might be in structuring information so within computational thinking that could be structuring information by type and attribute in a database but for data literacy it could be making sure that you're collecting and data of the right sort of categories whether you're expecting a number um or categorical data when you're collecting and there's the intersectional data literacy and digital literacy that sings like spotting misinformation or disinformation it might be using software to make graphs and it might be understanding your data privacy settings so there's quite a different range of skills and you can come at it in different directions now the way that we like to approach data literacy is through an inquiry based approach the idea that you can use data to solve problems and so we like the ppdap cycle which you can see there and which I think originally came from New Zealand so they do fantastic stuff with Statistics education in New Zealand and it's been adapted by various people ever since and with that you kind of go through this problem-solving cycle where you identify a problem that you want to solve or a question you want to ask and you go through the stages of planning collecting data analyzing the data and then drawing conclusions and although it looks like just one cycle inevitably you'll find that you might go back and forth between stages or you might reach the end and discover that you've got more questions that you really want to answer so it's quite a flexible thing and the whole thing really is based around Learners curiosity and if you work with primary school learners you know that they have boundless curiosity and what I like about this is It's a way to kind of harness that but teach them a bunch of skills which are related to data at the same time so we'll start and we'll go through um the different stages of the ppdap cycle um and then Kate has got some examples which will give you um more information about that with um kind of ground it for you a little bit so the problem stage is where you're identifying with your learners what it is that the project is going to be about and sometimes this is because the Learners have got burning curiosity and really want to know something maybe they've done an experiment in science or maybe they've just been wondering about something and they have questions the kind of questions that you might be trying to model as I wonder or um what do you wonder what do you want to find out how can we find out what's going on this kind of thing and it sometimes happens that instead of the Learners coming up with a question just Off the Cuffs that they might um have a claim that they see in a video or a newspaper online and and they're not sure whether it's true or not and here you can get them to bring in the kind of detective skills to think about well how much should we trust this information um and does it fit with things we already know and would that be a fair comparison or could there be bias here and these sorts of questions if you see a headline which looks fishy you can train your learners into routinely thinking this sort of thing and if they get interested enough in it maybe they want to to move to the next stage where they would plan out how they could investigate whether this claims true or not this might be ringing bells for you um if you're a class teacher maybe you already do this but you just call it something slightly different an example that we have here from from one of our primary schools Roslyn Primary School in Midlothian and they got very interested in how they could improve their health in the class and they wanted to use their data literacy skills to see if they could improve them and so here uh the girl has got a graph where they've been and Counting the sorts of exercises they've been doing in their gym class but they also did stuff with healthy eating and sleep and so on and they were just trying to track whether um we would feel better whether they'd be healthy after making various changes so they use their dating skills to do that the next stage is the plan stage and here I suppose you're using your skills as a teacher to kind of think in advance think through what question they're trying to answer and work out whether it's likely to be feasible with the amount of time you've got and the amount of resources you'd have and to spend on it as well so you're trying to guide them in one hand you want them to be able to create their own plans because that's exciting and it helps them feed off their Curiosity on the other hand you want to make sure that it's going to work and they're going to get some kind of an answer that makes sense at the end and but you do this you redeem your practice anyway it's just that maybe you need a little bit of experience in seeing how these data projects sometimes bring out so the kind of things that Learners might be thinking about here and it will depend on the the stage of the Learners and how experienced they are is whether you want them to collect their own data from stretch like do they want to run a survey do they want to count things within the school or maybe for more experienced owners is there an existing data set which they could use which already has a lot of answers and the advantage of using an existing data set would be that it's they can be very large they could cover um hundreds of thousands of people there could be National data sets and then the question you know the children can have um more general answers so there's various questions that you can um ask you can prompt the Learners to be thinking about how are they going to gather the data who are they going to collect it from um are there any possible ways that you would expect to get different results on different days or you know are there other things you need to think about how the data is collected the next stage in the pplex cycle is the data stage and that's really working with the data once you've collected it and even if you're working with children in the early years in Nursery School they don't have to be working with you know giant spreadsheets or databases they can be working in small collections of Real World objects like toys and they can still be learning the kinds of skills that they're going to need later on knowing how to sort data how to organize data and maybe this is the kind of thing that you do with unplugged activities with computational thinking anyway maybe it's you've got your Lego box and you're sorting the Bricks by color or maybe you decide you're going to sort them by size instead and maybe you're sorting objects into um different sorts of toys and likes cuddly toys or um plastic toys and so on um so you're really just using very playful kind of things that you might do in the early years anyway but you're kind of adding a data layer on top of it um and for more experienced Learners who maybe have have kind of um grasped the stage of using tangible physical objects and we kind of move beyond that if they're using pre-existing data and then you're thinking about whether the data set that they've found is likely to be reliable and who collected the data what range of values you might expect the data to take and what units of measurements were used and and as I mentioned before you know if you're trying to sort out the data that can actually give a physical process as well we've got the example here of a learner who I think she's been sorting out um the food waste after lunch to try and think about Plastics and cardboards and so on and she's she's sorting by the material that they that once waste was made of and so that's a very easy to grasp kind of activity um and when you get onto the analysis stage of the ppdap cycle it's not that we're expecting primary school children to be able to do complex and fancy statistics but a job at Primary School level rather is to try and give them an intuitive grasp of what data looks like and how to make sense of it from graphs and tables to get an intuitive understanding of it so that that's firm and solid by the time you come to their statistics lessons maybe later in high school or in further education and here depending on the age of the learner and maybe you've covered things about mean median and mode or spread and variance but maybe you haven't but you can still get these Concepts across so for example you might ask what is the most common value in this category or you might ask what's the biggest or the smallest volume in our data set so if you have all the heights of the children and relax then you can say well who's the tallest person how high is the smallest person and crucially one of the big questions that comes up a lot in data is what's the difference between the largest and the smallest value so that's the kind of measure of the variance and even if you haven't learned how to use a ruler and do measurements yet you can still see this is a difference between the biggest and Economist and you're still thinking about the concepts even if you haven't actually got onto the measurements yet now we're big into graphs Kate and I love a good graph um and there's lots of fun activities that we've got to do with this but just thinking about sorts of Concepts that we want to get across with graphs if you start at the early years you might be sorting again from these very tangible objects so um number one there is just some Leafs which I took off my 12 in the Autumn this year um and if you're trying to work out how many leaves you've got on different colors then you might move from the actual objects themselves to a picture representation of those objects so you can see in picture two there you've got a yeah the leaf picture to represent the other leaf and same for the other colors but they're labeled now and there's a bit of structure with the grid so that's getting across the idea that objects can be represented by pictures and then as we move across to to three there on the diagram then maybe instead of the pictures themselves you've got a DOT to represent each object or a tally mark um maybe later if you do as you would do any other maths you turn that into a frequency table with the numbers representing how many um and if you merge all your dots in a DOT plots together then you get a bar graph and then maybe and once the children understand fractions you can get into pie charts but what you're trying to do all the time is making sure that the Learners are secure is they make the step between these more abstracts increasingly abstract representations and it's worth seeing as well that um there are so many really cool graphs now data visualizations and infographics and which are far more exciting than the kind of graphs of packets of crisps which I had to do when I looked at my mass textbook and primary school and kids love them and so it's worth getting out some of the really fun graphs as well to look at and the kinds of questions that you might be asking you know the kind of cues you've been giving your learners would be what do you notice what do you wonder what about the shape of the graph can you see a pattern here and just getting cueing them into these sorts of questions every time that they they look at a graph um just as some examples there these are both about kind of world cultures one's about a survey of languages spoken at home and the other I think is um from secondary school learners where the children's families used to live I think and that's quite a nice example of how you can annotate a map with data and which isn't something that would be traditionally in a textbook but is increasingly common and then the last stage within the ppdex cycle is the conclusions stage and this is a bit were you thinking back to the first problem stage you're thinking well what question was it that I wanted to answer and what are the answers what did we find out and also what was surprising about it should we trust the results that do we know we collected the data in a slightly um imperfect ways or something that we could improve for next time how should we tell people in our community about what we discovered do we need to try and persuade somebody to act based on what we found out because really if you've gone to all the trouble of collecting new data and you have new knowledge and you should share it maybe it's going to make a difference to somebody in your community and of course maybe now you have even more questions and you need to to go around the cycle again this is an example from Roslyn primary school again and with their their healthiness project and here they have some data about the kind of food that people have as snacks within their school um and as I developed that we decided that they wanted to try offering a healthy Tuck Shop instead um of the normal Tuck Shop to see if they could try and encourage people to have more fruit and vegetables or healthy snacks not sure what they're making um in in the maybe they're making soup or something like that and I haven't checked it before maybe well yeah it could be it could be I don't think anyone's going to eat rotter and it was a snack um so that's that that school I think has really got the idea of making changes based on what we find out if they're doing for that so I'm going to stop talking Passover to keep I've got some examples for you yeah so um we've developed a set of prompt cards for Learners um that can be used to go through that PP DAC cycle giving prompts and ideas for for using data and so we've got a range of them we've got a set on uh Lego we've got a set on Plastics we've got set on Lost Property and we have a set on Birds um these activities should be available very soon in a few weeks time so that link goes to holding page but once once they're live then they'll be available on that on that website so for the bird cards we're hoping that Learners will be inspired to think about different questions they might have in their local area so that might be uh their the school part the school playground it might be a local park um but questions they might have about about birds about Wildlife um in their local area it might be how many birds visit the the school playground or different types of birds that visit or how much do they eat so these are just prompts that Learners that can prompt Learners to kind of then think about a project they might want to to solve they might want to go and investigate individually or in teams um data can absolutely be collaborative so yeah so this is the the problem stage for the plan stage and once Learners have a question that they want to answer a problem and then there's prompts of how they can plan out getting an answer to their question and what data they'll need to gather so if Learners want to know how often birds visit the school how could they solve that problem what would they need to watch uh would they need to watch out the windows and uh the whole day and be counting the birds they see or maybe they could measure how much bird seeds eaten on different days or in different locations to help them answer that question um for the data uh phase um Learners will need to go out and gather that data and sort it um if Learners are measuring for example the bird feed remaining in a couple of different bird feeders on on the school grounds maybe they could take measurements different times of day for a week or maybe they could take a measurement every day for a term and it depends on what they they feel is is necessary what they they've decided to measure for analysis what we can do is look at what we notice and wonder as Judy was saying earlier so we can think about other patterns or shapes that we can spot and what do those patterns tell us so if the bird feeders the bird feeders will go from Full to empty but what happens in the middle and why do we think that's happened why do we think those patterns have happened and then for conclusions um and we want to check we've answered the question so check we answer the question and then communicate our answers our findings so what have we discovered perhaps we need to make changes maybe we need to move the locations of the bird feeders and try again or maybe we've got more questions and want to gather more data so perhaps we need to point a webcam at the bird feeder so we can identify the types of birds that visit um if you'd like to use any of these bird cards or the Plastics or the Lost Property they will be available soon um hopefully in a few weeks time um as Judy was talking we we have a teach data Guide for primary teachers that um there's a draft available for you there again it will be available very very soon um we hope uh in a few weeks actually um and so this guide uh is a sneak peek please don't share it any further but it will be available on the same web link again um and the guy talks through the ppdac cycle how to teach data literacy across the curriculum and there's a handy section at the end that goes through links to great resources that are available online um and ideas of things that that you can be doing and part of the guide is uh learning is an asking good questions poster um so it's a two-page spread in the in the guide but we have it available as a separate poster because we loved it so much um and so it's just helping Learners think about how they can frame questions um in a way that's measurable that's achievable it's quantifiable in a way that supports them making an investigation carrying out an investigation and turns them into superheroes um other resources that we have um we have a set of I think it's 11 short videos um two to three minute videos that are available on T for teachers on what is data techniques for teaching data literacy explaining the stages of the pp DAC cycle they're suitable for secondary teachers as well as primary so they're they're quite General in terms of age and stage but they're um very reassuring videos they're they're not expecting high levels of knowledge they're step-by-step guides very short videos so hopefully those would help um for you wanting to to get a step step into this area um as Jane was mentioning we have live lessons so um we worked with this company uh cyber skills live who'd been doing cyber science cyber security videos um and we've developed a set of data related videos with them of like a live lessons um so we have uh defend the Rhino lesson which is using ml machine learning um we have a code your own data selfie which is looking at personal data and encryption and we have a plug in the numbers uh lesson um if we developed for cop which is Learners um calculating energy from solar panels that they could put on the the roof of their school so classes log into the website um and they carry out engaging activities while there's a live broadcast video broadcast that's shown to the class and there's like YouTuber style presenters who explain the tasks give backgrounds uh information and do shout outs to schools and Learners um Jane mentioned twenty thousand we've actually 20 over 28 000 place since November 2020 um from schools colleges universities people all around the UK um and all over the world actually the Rhino lesson um was our first one we wanted to do something exciting that we went maybe you maybe wouldn't expect when you're coming to lesson on data science and so invited Learners to join our data science team to help us stop a gang of rhino pictures we've shown them how to use data science skills to analyze the security camera data from across a national park in South Africa and it's based on real life case study uh with conservationists and technologists in South Africa that are using artificial intelligence and the internet of things to help save endangered wildlife and so we designed the lesson so that no previous technical knowledge was needed no data science skills were required and all the instructions were built into the activities and the kids have a lot of fun on them as well um speaking of fun um we also have a set of Escape rooms um so we have a set of themed Escape rooms um based on this uh Motley gang of villains who are the Vikings um they are high-tech Viking villains who are trying to take over the world and you as an agent of data have to stop them um so it's a set of downloadable data themed escape room puzzles that can be downloaded again that link uh is a holding page it will be live hopefully Again by the summer um we've got the graphic designer working like crazy trying to finish them off for us and all good villains have uh uh pets evil villains have to have evil pets as well so uh we we have a set of pets as well um but the activities uh the Escape rooms are designed to give a sense of escapism like a field trip but without the hassle of transportation and paperwork so you are an agent of data the defense against temporal attacks and you must stop the villains from building a secret lair from sending information into the past using their information time machine uh so that they're trying to raise money for their evil schemes and you also have to figure out the secret code for uh your base when you accidentally lock yourself into the base all using graphs and charts and logic to solve the puzzles and clues and so for example this activity the Agents of data must work out where their secret layer is um based on Clues um so we know that the Viking villains are expanding an old existing nuclear bunkers so they have a data set for that it's located near a wind farm so we give the Learners a data set for that the Vikings want to steal the free electricity it's near an existing data center because they want to to hack into the internet and cause chaos and using a transatlantic undersea internet fiber cable so the Learners find out all about these things as well but they're using these data sets to map the information and narrow the possibilities down our Viking villains are pretty environmentally conscious they want to take over the world but they want it to be in good State when they take it over um we've also got a set of uh teachers working with us doing internet things resources and looking at data from sensors in their own schools um so that's being installed across Southeast Scotland but Learners have been using this in really interesting ways so for example Learners in Rosalind Primary School have investigated the volcanic eruption in Tonga which showed up on their school's iot censors as a pressure wave and we put them in touch with a volcanologist from the University who was actually working on site in Ecuador at the time who answered the question their questions but also confirmed their findings and and um showed them that the the measurements and readings that they'd taken um and the calculations they've done were actually pretty accurate um compared to what the volcanologists have been had been measuring and calculating these are real world connections engaging contexts for Learners um and it brings the importance of data and learning about data to life um as well as our resources um you know we've been showcasing a lot of our resources but there are lots of fantastic resources available some are in the book um the the teachers data literacy guide but also this incredible number of of books that are available that are great for kick-starting discussions about data we had a secondary math teacher um talking about this if book that's um first on the list here um and the math teacher kind of thought a skinny little book and he I think he came back and he was just raving for about five minutes all the other teachers about it and I've done this and I've done that and like he'd used I think this book with three different year groups in secondary school and had like 20 different engaging lessons just from a skinny little guide and I would never have got this from a textbook and so sometimes it's it's useful to try different things and there's some there's some fantastic lovely books that are such so well designed um I think that is us for resources um our our next next steps for you suggest the next steps so we've got the videos so you can you can do a little bit of professional learning in your own time and watch the videos we've got the the handbook we also have a mailing list um if you want to find out more about the professional learning we're running about new resources where we're launching but also please do get in touch we're always delighted to hear from people asking questions and wanting to know more about data if you'd like to get in touch with either of us um the next slide has our contact details as well um so please do get in touch with us and and chat with us about data cool I just wanted to give him a big round of applause I really think that's brilliant it's just fulfilled all my dreams what are you going to talk about so it's brilliant so thank you our next seminar which I'm really excited about is um on the 6th of June and it's from Aim who is um from the marina Bears team in the states where they do the um like pre so under five years old students and she's coming along to talk about scratch Junior projects and assessment and a 12-week coding curriculum for a very very youngest of Learners I'm so excited to have someone from the marina Bears uh Team coming to talk to us so we look forward to seeing you there thank you very much again to Judy and Kate for talking about data the thing that we all love and um I'll see you at the next one have a lovely evening everybody we're off afternoon or morning or whatever time it is Wherever You Are

2023-06-07 14:21

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