Unit Two: Helping students interpret data intensive media

Return to: Go to: ETAP 623 Spring 2020 (Zhang) | Brian's Profile Page | Unit 3: Creating data intensive documents

Learning Objectives

1. Learners will be able to identify types of data intensive media
2. Learners will identify strategies for teaching interpretation of data intensive media
3. Explain the benefit of data using intensive media in the classroom

Do Now

Think about your experience as a science teacher, or your future as a science teacher, and list the types of scientific documents you need students to understand. List the documents and provide a brief summary for how you go about helping students interpret them. Use the following discussion space to post your initial ideas: Talk: Discussion Unit 2

After you have done this, watch the embedded video in the following link and see what strategies you use that were mentioned in the video.

http://www.mtscienceducation.org/toolkit-home/scientific-engineering-practices/analyzing-interpreting-data/

Mini-Lecture

So why is it important to organize data? Without data intensive documents such as charts/tables, graphs, and diagrams, science would be a collection of numbers without order. Watch the following video on meta data, which incorporates questions you can ask your students when looking at data to help them understand it better. The video is embedded on the right side of the page. https://guides.library.pdx.edu/data/metadata

Supporting Scientific Text: Read the following article about teaching interpretation skills for science documents:

https://www.edutopia.org/article/supporting-literacy-science-classroom

Interpreting charts/tables

Throughout my years of teaching science, I have noticed that many students come into the class without the knowledge needed to chart or graph data. Many times science teachers take for granted that students will know how to chart and graph information. Unfortunately, this is often not the case and if students do not know how to interpret these types of data intensive documents, they are not going to be able to achieve our definition of science literacy. In order to understand complex systems students need to be able to interpret the documents that scientists use to disseminate information. The above article gave us several strategies for helping students understand scientific texts and documents.

Interpreting Graphs:

Interpreting Diagrams:

Work Period

Respond to the following questions in the discussion section for this unit.

1. What types of data intensive documents have we identified as being important for students? Explain why a student would need to be able to interpret these documents to be scientifically literate.
2. Describe strategies we as educators can take to help our students interpret each of the following: Textual documents, charts/tables, graphs, and diagrams. Explain how we can help our students organize data to display it in an easy to read format.
3. Predict the benefits of helping students to interpret these types of documents. How will adopting these strategies help our students achieve scientific literacy?

Answe these questions in the following discussion space: Talk: Discussion Unit 2