Introducing Data Literacy 101 course on Tuva

This blog post is written by Molly Schauffler. Dr. Schauffler is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maine School of Earth and Climate Sciences. 

Raise your hand if the idea of teaching your students data analysis and statistical thinking is a little unsettling for you.

For many of us who teach social studies, history, language arts, and (yes) even science, it has been a very long time since we took a course in statistics. For many, statistics is a scary label.

Even fewer of us have ever had training in how to incorporate statistical thinking into curriculum for young students. Yet assessments and standards expect our students to analyze and interpret data and make compelling arguments from evidence. Yikes.

The good news is that statistics educators and education researchers, and Tuva, promote an initial exploratory approach to learning how to think statistically about data. Research finds that students have lots to say about data once they have tools, opportunity, and guidance to explore data informally and reason about the stories they find.

Quantitative, or “Confirmatory” statistical analysis comes later, once students grasp challenges of making informal inferences about groups and attributes that are variable. 

In Exploratory Data Analysis, students first learn to recognize and talk about variability, and how variability and certainty are related. They learn to explore data, make informal claims, and develop language for describing their data.

If you feel hesitant about guiding students in data analysis, you are not alone. Many of you have asked for some kind of “orientation” for students starting out with data on Tuva. 

Today, we are excited to launch Data Literacy 101, a course with modules and lessons designed to establish fundamental exploratory data analysis skills (“Level I”).  

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In the coming weeks, we will add lessons that scaffold students in more quantitative analyses (“Level II”), that then launch them into a grounded and integrated approach to analyzing data as evidence (“Level III”).

Data Literacy 101 lessons incorporate pre- and post-assessment questions to help identify gaps and gains in learning. Lessons are tagged to identify relevant data literacy standards. Follow-on activities will give students practice in skills just learned in a lesson using datasets tagged by content area. 

In addition to building students’ skills, Data Literacy 101 is a useful reference if you want to refresh your own familiarity with basic statistical concepts and tools and language.  

Data Literacy 101 can help you and your students experience the fun of playing with data and telling the stories they find. Let’s get started! 

Introducing An Easier Way to Filter & Find Datasets on Tuva!

There are 300+ Tuva Datasets in our library covering topics such as the Climate Change, Land & Sea Animals, Presidents of the United States, and many many more.

Today, we are excited to do an initial launch of a more powerful Filter Bar to meet the diverse needs of our educators within the Tuva community.

A More Powerful Filter Bar:

Now, if you wanted to find all the Science or Environment-related Tuva Datasets that are small in size, you can find them very quickly by choosing Science & Environment in the Subject drop-down and 1-40 in the Size drop-down, like this:

As you can see above, you can now filter and find Tuva Datasets based on a number of additional parameters beyond Subject & Grade Level such as:

  1. The Size of the dataset (How many data points are there?)
  2. The NGSS standard (particularly relevant for all our US Science Educators)
  3. The dataset Language (For our non-English speaking educators and learners)

Now, if you wanted to find all the Science or Environment-related Tuva Datasets that are small in size, you can find them very quickly by choosing Science & Environment in the Subject drop-down and 1-40 in the Size drop-down, like this:

Or, if you wanted to find a dataset that is related to the MS-ESS3-5 (Earth & Human Activity) NGSS Standard, you can find it very quickly by choosing MS-ESS3-5 in the NGSS drop-down, like this:


Send Us Your Favorite Datasets & Win

Do you have a favorite dataset that you have used in your previous lessons or units? Does it come from an authentic source? Is it licensed under Creative Commons? Are you able to link to it?

Send us your favorite datasets to hello@tuvalabs.com over the next two weeks and enter a chance to win a Tuva T-shirt, a Tuva Coffee Mug, and other goodies!