By Sydney MaHan, Virginia Sea Grant Student Correspondent
Additional Reporting by Julia Robins, Staff Writer
In today’s high school science classes, students are expected to work with and interpret real data more and more. But for teachers, finding and manipulating that data presents challenges.
Lisa Lawrence and Kevin Goff, Virginia Institute of Marine Science educators affiliated with Virginia Sea Grant (VASG), organized and led a professional development workshop to help teachers get through these obstacles. They taught William & Mary science teachers in training and their veteran mentor teachers how to incorporate data from real scientific research into instruction, utilize Excel for data analysis and interpretation, and use a variety of resources to further engage students.
“This was one of the best workshops that I have attended during my 35 years of teaching,” said one of the participants about the November 2 VASG-funded workshop.
Said another pre-service teacher after attending the workshop, “I feel much more comfortable using Excel and incorporating real scientific data into my own classroom.”
One of the challenges teachers face in bringing data into the classroom is finding authentic data that will work with both their learning objectives and course curricula. “Teachers just don’t have the time to do that kind of thing,” says Goff. “So it’s essential to provide resources that will do some of that for them.”
Another challenge is training teachers to work with data themselves, so that they are confident and comfortable enough to lead their students in data analysis and spreadsheet software. “The idea is to get the students to engage in authentic science activities,” says Goff, but that can’t happen until teachers are comfortable analyzing, graphing, and interpreting the data themselves.
Goff also touched on the importance of getting students to engage in genuine inquiry, such as participating in science-like activities that are centered on a single investigative question and require data analysis to find the answer.
To address these challenges, Lawrence and Goff had participants walk through different activities that they could apply in their own classrooms. In an activity called Data Detectives, teachers received clues about an experiment. Based solely on a graph and caption, the teachers had to work together to figure out what type of experiment was conducted, who conducted it, and why it was conducted. In doing so, they took a bottom-up-approach to data interpretation—starting with the results and working backwards to methods, questions, and hypotheses.
“I think the workshop went exceptionally well,” says Goff. “We did a lot of hands-on inquiry activities and the feedback was positive.” One of the attendees even used one of the activities with her students within a week of the workshop.
For the workshop organizers, says Goff, “That’s instant gratification.”
