Science

Do Kids Need to Learn to Graph by Hand?

Middle School Science Team Upends Expectations

Knowing how to create graphs by hand is an essential skill.

That may have been unexpected, coming as it does from the blog of a digital graphing tool. However, it’s important to clarify that using a graphing tool, like Tuva, and manually graphing are not at odds with each other; nor does one necessarily serve as a prerequisite. In fact, as the middle school science team at Northwest Middle School discovered, the two approaches are synergistic.

Northwest MS teachers Judith Neugebauer, Victoria Mauro, Anne Salisbury, and John Pikus.

“[Our students’] ability to see the numerical data in a graphical form is really transitioning from one realm to the other,” explained teacher Judith Neugebauer.

The team, which also includes teachers Victoria Mauro, Anne Salisbury, and John Pikus, is based out of a school in Salt Lake City. They began augmenting their manual graphing practices with Tuva’s digital graphing tools about a year ago.

The Most Persistent Problems for Novice Graph Creators

Adding digital graphing tools to the mix for novice graph makers is a step some are reticent to take. (Psst… I used to be amongst them.) Because digital graphing tools automatically do some of the steps for students, teachers wonder if students should know how to graph manually before they begin utilizing digital tools.

Before we address that concern, let’s take a step back to consider the most common skills with which novice graph makers struggle:

Placing variables on the correct axes
Setting up equal intervals and scaling them appropriately
Choosing an appropriate graph type
Accurately plotting data points
Including descriptive titles

The question is, then, will using digital graphing tools before students have mastered manual graphing prevent students from developing these important skills?

Better Together

Data literacy education expert, Molly Schauffler said that 15 years ago she would have said yes, but the development of drag-and-drop graphing tools, like Tuva, shifted her perspective.

“My sense now is that playing with the data and visualizing it on a digital platform gives students a visual sense of purpose, direction, possibility, and choice without getting mired in drawing and mechanics,”Schauffler said. “That said, I am still an advocate of hand drawing graphs alongside digital exploration.”

Schauffler is a founding member of a group called Partners in Data Literacy, a paleoecologist, an assistant research professor emerita for the University of Maine, and a former Tuva consultant.

“We still have them graph in their notebooks too, but this year it’s going way faster.”

The benefits of using both methods simultaneously are evident at Northwest, where teachers say making graphs on Tuva has hastened the development of manual graphing skills for their 7th- and 8th-grade students.

“We still have them graph in their notebooks too,” Neugebauer explained, “but this year it’s going way faster.”

The teachers there credit the uptick in pace to repeated exposure to and practice with variable placement and graph types in Tuva.

Our Suggestions for Achieving Synergy

Digital graphing tools exist on a spectrum from fully automated to completely open and incremental. When combining manual and digital graphing practices, consider how the features of the digital tool may impact skill development.

For Tuva users helping graphing novices master the five skills listed above, we suggest pairing manual graphing and Tuva in the following way:

Practice Manually	Practice With Tuva
Setting up equal intervals and scaling them appropriately	Placing variables on the correct axes
Accurately plotting points	Choosing an appropriate graph type
	Adding descriptive titles

In most instances, Tuva sets up intervals and plots data automatically once students have chosen which attributes (variables) to drag to which axes. Doing these things manually helps students understand a block on the graph represents a specific numerical increase.

That said, it is not necessary for students to practice establishing equal intervals and plotting data points every time they graph. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the other skills students are trying to master. Making graphs manually is so time-consuming that it is hard to achieve rapid repetition of a skill. Repetition is incredibly helpful for achieving mastery when it comes to placing variables, choosing graph types, and writing titles. Tuva enables targeted practice in these aspects of graphing. Students can also quickly and easily fix errors instead of needing to start all over, avoiding frustration and shutdown.

Swapped axes are a common woe of novice graphers.

Repeated practice can help.

Are We Graphing for Graphing’s Sake?

Perhaps, however, this entire discussion misses the point. Why is it important for our students to be able to create graphs? Is it simply so that they can create graphs? Of course not. The ultimate goal is to empower students to uncover insights about data through their graphs. Scientific literacy and data literacy are, after all, inextricable.

It’s easy to lose sight of that goal, however, in the day-to-day slog of asking kids over and over and over, “If you count up by ones, will you have enough space on your graph paper?” or, “Where does the independent variable go again?” And if we’ve lost sight of our goal, chances are our students never even knew a larger purpose existed in the first place. Of course, student motivation suffers when there is a lack of purpose.

Northwest teacher Anne Salisbury said Tuva has helped boost student engagement in the graphing process.

“I think using Tuva has convinced them that graphing has a purpose,” she said. “The point is not just to make a graph; it’s to use a graph. In the past we spent so much time getting them to physically graph on paper, that we did not have time to analyze data that is already graphed and figure out what it means.”

Former Scientist Centers Data in Her HS Biology Instruction

Maria Lee, High School Bio Teacher

Before Maria Lee became a science teacher, she was an environmental scientist. Her experiences working on salmon restoration in Washington State influence her approach to instruction.

“Primarily, I understand the importance of data,” Lee explained. “Data is not perfunctory; it is really an essential part of understanding science.”

As such, Lee dedicates a substantial portion of her high school biology course at East High School in Salt Lake City to the mathematical aspects of scientific understanding. In the past when working with data, Lee has had students use premade graphs or make their own using spreadsheets. This year, she opted to use Tuva. Now Lee calls out Tuva as one of her three favorite curriculum supplements, alongside leading EdTech platforms Newsela and Nearpod.

Lee was introduced to Tuva last year, but was hesitant to use it, fearing the learning curve would be steep. When she finally dove in this year, she discovered her worries were unfounded. Lee noted she did not spend time learning the Tuva tools in advance, but learned them in tandem with her students.

“ After just one day of playing around with Tuva with my students, I felt so comfortable- nearly expert level.”

“Suddenly, They Could See It”

The reasons for Lee’s enthusiasm are multiple. First and foremost, incorporating Tuva has accelerated her students’ learning.

Her first unit, a riff off of OpenSciEd’s Ecosystem Interactions and Dynamics, leaned into analyzing and interpreting line graphs and scatter plots. Lee described a class in which students were identifying whether or not there was a relationship between rainfall and wildebeest behavior in the Serengeti.

An example of student work from Lee’s class. Lee pulled data from OpenSciEd into Tuva.

Up to this point in their OpenSciEd unit, they’d primarily used line graphs to observe change over time. Now, they were struggling with the transition to scatter plots, getting confused about time versus relationship.

Lee uploaded the data onto Tuva and projected a scatter plot of rainfall vs. wildebeest occupancy on her interactive whiteboard. Then she had students come up and trace the dots from left to right and try to describe what their hand was doing- going up, going down, staying steady, or moving erratically. Some students were getting it, but many were not. Lee had them activate the least squares line.

Then, she said, “suddenly they could see it!” The line helped them ignore the background noise and identify the trend.

Another student work sample, this time with a scatter plot.

Student Ownership

Lee also said she appreciates the level of ownership Tuva gives students in the process of data exploration.

“Tuva puts students first in their interaction with data, so that they are driving their interaction and learning with the data and not getting it secondhand through a teacher filtering it for them.”

This level of independence is possible, she said, because Tuva leaves room for making mistakes and fixing them. With other tools, she’s needed to be more prescriptive because mistakes are harder to recover from.

Academic Communication: Scaffolding Up

Finally, Lee credits Tuva with creating more opportunities for extended learning. For example, when working with a class of multilingual learners, she found that Tuva’s interactive graphing tools accelerated the learning process enough that some students had time to deepen their interpretation.

Her class was working on the Tuva activity Dynamic Wildlife. (You can interact with the Wolf and Elk in Yellowston dataset the activity uses below!) She asked all students in the section to use the Identify and Interpret ( I²) method to discuss the wolf and elk population data. For example, a student might identify, “I see the line goes up at the start of the graph,” and interpret, “This means the number of wolves was increasing.”

Try dragging and dropping Elk Count (observed) onto the Y2 axis.

Many students completed this task quicker than they would have with print resources or spreadsheets. Lee capitalized on the newly-freed time to teach them to add quantitative measures, such as year and population count, to their evidence.

Lee noted that her class’s work with Tuva fits perfectly into the larger district goals, such as strengthening academic discourse and writing. Referring to Tuva as a “writing-science interface”, she said, “It’s the only tool I know that is really actively improving reading and writing skills for science. ”

Engaging Students with Data That Hits Close to Home

In 2023, Minnesota saw an unprecedented 22 air quality alerts in just 52 days. And for one day in mid-May 2024, St. Paul held the unenviable position of worst air quality in the United States.

6th-grade Earth Science Teacher Emily Harer saw potential for authentic science learning in the unfortunate air quality downturn. Air quality issues are a suitably complex issue. Since the publication of the Next Generation Science Standards in 2013, major emphasis has been placed on anchoring science learning in complex phenomena. Even better, it was a phenomenon her students could immediately relate to.

“National curriculum is often focused on things that aren’t local,” she explained. “Having local phenomena is extremely important for students to latch onto.”

Harer, who teaches at Global Arts Plus Upper School in St. Paul, said she wants students to know that science is all around them and that they can contribute to the body of science knowledge through research and data collection. That’s much easier to do if the phenomenon they’re studying is local and relevant.

Putting Local Data into Students’ Hands

During the 2023-24 school year, Harer engaged her students in a month-long air quality unit. Throughout the unit, Harer had her students investigate the myriad factors contributing to air quality. Using historical weather and air pollution data from the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, Harer created datasets using all local data. Then she uploaded them into Tuva and embedded them into the lessons on her class website.

Harer’s students can use Tuva tools to manipulate the data right on her class website because she has embedded the datasets on it.

“It was exciting to see students think about experimental setup, drag and drop the attributes, to then find answers to their questions,” said Harer.

Hosting the data in Tuva allowed her students to more easily interact with it and to look for relationships between particulate matter and other variables such as wildfires, rainfall, seasons, and land cover.

Students were able to manipulate the data to determine when wildfire smoke was in the air in Ramsey County in 2023. They saw the daily changes in particulate matter through time and could point directly to when the wildfire happened.

A student uses Tuva to explore the variables that impact St. Paul’s air quality.

The complexity of the phenomenon prompted students to generate new questions as they encountered unexpected findings. For example, when they compared ozone and temperature data in Ramsey County to Voyageurs National Park to the north, they realized that their prediction was actually opposite to what the data showed. Voyageurs National Park had substantially more ozone than Ramsey County in the spring. This cognitive dissonance spurred further inquiry and research.

Outcomes: Engagement and Deep Understanding

The combination of real-world, local data and Tuva tools is one Harer plans to repeat for two reasons: engagement and depth of understanding.

“I don’t usually see people getting that jacked about graphs,” admitted Harer.

Memorable student reactions when playing with the data on Tuva included: “Oh wow! Oh my gosh, I just did that!”, “Whoa! The rain washed that particulate matter out!!” and, “Dang! This is really life… in St. Paul.”

Engagement drove learning. By the end of the unit, students really understood particles in the air and were asking deep questions about weather, topography, vegetation, and air quality – startling high-quality questions. Jason Johnson, chief engineer at TSI Inc., a Minnesota-based company that designs and engineers air monitors for scientific research, visited the class near the end of the unit. During his visit, he projected a graph from his graduate program and was surprised at the students’ insightful observations and questions.

“They are 6th-graders, and they understand this so deeply!” he told Harer.

The graph Jason Johnson shared with Harer’s 6th-graders during his classroom visit, from “Engines and nanoparticles: a review” David B. Kittelson Journal of Aerosol Science. Volume 29, Issues 5–6, 1 June 1998, Pages 575-588

Taking it Even Further

This year, Harer plans to expand the project to include data collected by instruments on the roof of the school buildings. The campus has a weather station. Last year, Harer was able to use grant funding from the National STEM Scholar Program to purchase and install a BlueSky air quality monitor as well. By the time her Air Quality Unit rolls around, she will have a full year of data from these instruments. She anticipates that her hyper-local weather and air quality data will be even more engaging for her students and will help them understand how science fits into their lives.

Emily Harer poses beside the school’s new BlueSky air monitor with Dr. Lucy Rose from the University of Minnesota Department of Forestry Resources. Rose assisted with the project.

“I see science everywhere. When kids do too, that is so exciting” she said. “I want kids to see how cool Minnesota is and that we have a lot to offer here.”

Incorporate Local Data into Your Lessons

Uploading data into Tuva and sharing it with your students is simple. Here are the steps and, in case you need help, links to our associated support pages.

Find data and, if it is not already, put it into a spreadsheet.
Upload the data on Tuva.
Share the dataset by assigning it to your class or embedding it onto your website.

“Why are we learning this?”

Utah Teacher Macy Cook Is Ready With an Answer

Macy Cook is a 6th-grade teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her self-contained classroom at Uintah Elementary School houses 28 11- and 12-year-olds. Like many students on the cusp of adolescence, Cook’s pupils are beginning to chafe at authority and to question the requirements adults place upon them. They want to know, “Why are we learning this?”

Cook doesn’t believe it’s a snarky question, but rather a valid query that deserves a serious response. She vividly recalls hating it when teachers responded, “Because I said so,” and she’s determined to reply thoughtfully when her own students wonder about the importance of a particular concept.

“I want everything to have a reason,” she said. “I want them to know where it will show up in their life, so it has purpose.”

Purpose and Application – A Quick Snapshot of the Research

Cook’s educational philosophy aligns well with national efforts to improve science education and is backed by a substantial body of research. One of the major principles of The Framework for K-12 Science Education is Connecting to Students’ Interests and Experiences.

“In order for students to develop a sustained attraction to science and for them to appreciate the many ways in which it is pertinent to their daily lives, classroom learning experiences in science need to connect with their own interests and experiences.” – The Framework for K-12 Science Education

Multiple studies indicate lack of purpose hinders STEM learning. Interventions that emphasize the utility of science improve outcomes and persistence, particularly for historically underrepresented students. Practitioners have shown when students apply science, such as when they participate in citizen science, it can enhance motivation, interest, knowledge, and communication skills.

Tuva Helps Contextualize Science

Cook was introduced to Tuva this winter when she participated in a professional development series hosted by the Salt Lake City School District and led by Tuva instructional specialists. Cook quickly became a fan and has been frequently using Tuva with her students.

“Tuva has been really amazing for them to see the real-world application of the topics they’ve learned,” said Cook.

Tuva’s Content Library includes 400 curated, real-world datasets and more than 450 applied math and science lessons based on them, which makes connecting to the world outside of the classroom easy.

Recently, Cook’s students have been studying atomic chemistry. Cook said it is hard for sixth graders to wrap their heads around the concept that elements make up molecules and molecules make up everything on Earth.

Cook used Tuva’s Nature of the Elements activity to help her kids grasp the importance of elements.

Tuva’s lesson, Introduction: The Nature of Elements, intentionally pointed out the relevance. One question prompted students to complete the sentence, “A few elements that are important to me are…” Cook expanded the question to include, “What elements do you recognize?” Within moments, students were calling across the room as they encountered familiar terms. “Aluminum- like in aluminum foil.” “Neon signs.” “Oxygen!” “We use chlorine in our pool.”

Understanding the elements’ ubiquity gave purpose to the ensuing exercise. Exploring the trends in the periodic table was transformed from something abstract to something intimately connected to their daily lives.

Another Answer to “Why?’

When Cook was in 6th grade, her math teacher’s response to, “Why?” was, “You are not going to always have a calculator in your back pocket.” Flash forward 20-odd years- Cook grins at me through the Zoom screen and waggles her cell phone. (Psyche!)

Technology has and will continue to evolve rapidly. Cook predicts our rapidly changing world will require today’s students to have stronger data literacy skills.

“The future of what the kids are going to do is probably going to be computer-based, so learning how to manipulate and read data is really important. Even if it’s not something the average adult does now, it will be.”

Experts agree. Harvard Data Science Review estimated there will be more than 150,000 U.S. job openings requiring data analysis skills by 2025. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports higher-than-average job growth in data-related careers by 2032. Graduates with strong data skills will have an advantage, not only in data science but also in diverse fields such as agriculture and real estate that increasingly rely on data.

What’s Obvious to Us, Isn’t to Them

The reasons for providing a rigorous education in science and data literacy are obvious to adults. Not so for kids. Cook’s intentional focus on purpose and application, combined with the baked-in relevance of real-world data, ensures that her students are never left wondering, “Why am I Iearning this?”

This Teacher Wishes Her Content Wasn’t Relevant

The Unique Challenges of Teaching About Environmental Injustice to Students Who Are Living It

Satina Ciandro’s environmental science students have experienced environmental injustice firsthand, which, paradoxically, makes it harder to teach about climate change.

On the one hand, it’s personal- offering baked-in relevance. On the other hand… it’s personal. Which means it’s also emotionally fraught.

“It took me 23 years of teaching science to really teach about climate change. Not just mention it, really teach it,” admitted Ciandro.

A Student Body Familiar with Inequity

Ciandro teaches science at Watsonville High School, located in a small city in the Monterey Bay Area of California. 96% of her students are Hispanic. 88% of her students are economically disadvantaged.

“Most of my students are students of color and they understand injustice very well,” said Ciandro.

In fact, many of her students were directly impacted last March when the Pajaro River Levee was breached, flooding homes in a low-income community primarily inhabited by migrant workers and their families. Needed repairs on the levee had been deferred by the Army Corps of Engineers when their cost-benefit analysis concluded the low home values in the area didn’t warrant prioritizing levee repairs.

Getting Past the Paralysis

The breach is just one example of environmental injustice Ciandro’s students have faced. A 2021 Environmental Protection Agency study indicated, “…the most severe harms from climate change fall disproportionately upon underserved communities who are least able to prepare for, and recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts.” Racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly vulnerable, they stated.

Ciandro’s hesitancy to really go deeply into climate change stemmed in part from recognition that discussing yet another example of environmental injustice would be triggering for her students. She worried her lessons would be all doom and gloom.

Ciandro also worried about her lack of perspective. How could she teach about an experience she had not had?

“I am a white lady… I don’t know what they are living through,” she said.

Getting it right felt insurmountable.

Over the past few years, Satina has picked up a few trauma-informed strategies that help her feel more comfortable delving into the science of climate change and all of its messy ramifications. She’s learned that providing time and space for students to process things that are emotionally triggering is imperative. Ciandro incorporates art, journaling, and other forms of reflection into her science instruction.

She’s also learned that focusing on solutions helps reduce the doom and gloom factor.

“You can’t just point out the injustice and not do anything about it,” Ciandro said.

A recent study revealed 59% of young people ages 16-25 were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change, a phenomenon increasingly known as eco-anxiety. Some eco-anxiety can spur people to action; too much eco-anxiety can have the opposite effect, leading to despair and inaction.

Having students take steps to help solve the problem can be empowering and can reduce anxiety. She cautioned, however, that you need to explore solutions in a way that does not put all the burden on the students to figure it out.

“That’s the point of the whole lesson- not to make you feel bad, but to consider what are the solutions, and how are we going to do the things to fix it?”

Striking the Balance with Urban Heat Islands

Recently, Ciandro applied these trauma-informed strategies in an urban heat islands unit. Ciandro was inspired to take this angle by Dr. Tammie Visintainer when she participated in her National Science Foundation-funded Climate Justice Action Research Summer Program at San Jose State University. The cohort of participating educators are all using urban heat islands as a lens to investigate climate justice with their students.

Urban centers tend to be hotter than surrounding rural areas. Materials like brick and pavement absorb and hold onto more heat than vegetation. This creates “islands” of heat. As the climate changes, heat-related deaths have also increased. Heat-related deaths in the United States spiked 59% between 2018 and 2022 according to the National Center for Health Statistics. People in cities are at higher risk of heat-related ailments.

Ciandro knew from her program that even within the cities, however, the effects of heat are not felt equally. Urban areas with fewer trees get hotter. Urban areas with lower tree density usually have two other things in common: high minority populations and historical subjection to redlining. Redlining was a practice carried out by lenders to create policies around who they would lend money to.

Certain districts were “redlined”. Mortgage lenders marked them in red on the maps, which meant they were coded as “hazardous.” Banks would not give mortgages to people buying homes in redlined districts. The rationale listed for assigning a specific neighborhood rating often cited race.

In nearby San Jose, California, for example, agents specifically noted one of these two reasons: “inharmonious racial concentration” or “heterogeneous” for five of 12 districts rated “hazardous.”

“When I went through history class in my white suburban school, I never learned about redlining. I did not know that it was on purpose and that it was systemic. I didn’t know. I know it’s not an excuse, but I’m learning with them,” said Ciandro.

Ciandro wants to make sure her students do learn about redlining. She designed a two-month long, project-based unit around the urban heat island phenomenon. Within the course of her unit, she wanted her students to discover the temperature differences; do some experiments to determine what factors affect temperature in our built environment; uncover the correlation between the 1930s neighborhood ratings and heat; and to take action to make a change.

How Tuva was Able to Help

Ciandro found that premade graphic visualizations about urban heat islands are easy to find, but she wanted students to be able to explore and manipulate the raw data themselves. Discovering a relationship on your own as you tinker with data makes a bigger impression than observing it on a premade graph. Ciandro’s go-to program for data exploration is Tuva. Ciandro has been a loyal Tuva user for many years and uses at least one Tuva activity per unit in her environmental science course.

Ciandro immediately went to Tuva in search of a relevant dataset but was disappointed to find we did not have one. After a conversation with us this summer during which she expressed a need for a dataset about urban heat islands and redlining, Tuva team member Annette Brickley curated one. She located a 2020 research paper by Hoffman, Shandas and Pendleton from Groundwork USA. When Brickley reached out to ask for permission to use the data on Tuva, Hoffman generously shared their complete dataset. Tuva’s dataset pulls out data from seven of the U.S. cities included in Hoffman’s paper.

Later, Ciandro used Tuva’s Activity Builder to create a lesson that would help her students explore the dataset and discover relationships between neighborhood grade, tree canopy, impervious surfaces and temperature. The story the data tells is pretty bleak, but Ciandro manages to infuse hope at the end of the activity.

Box plot showing that neighborhoods given ratings of C and D in the 1930s are hotter today than those that were rated A or B.

“Imagine you are a city planner and your job is to allocate funds for a major climate action grant,” she writes. “How will you distribute the funds to each type of neighborhood? Justify your answer using data.”(We liked her activity so much, we published it. Access it here.)

Ciandro’s students also collected data across the Watsonville High School campus. Each group selected two spots, collected surface temperature data once per week, and entered the data on Tuva. Through this exercise, they observed locations near concrete were consistently hotter than green spaces.

Student Empowerment

As the unit neared its end, four of Ciandro’s students – Jazmyn, Mario, Rocio and Anail- gathered around a Zoom meeting to tell me about their learning experience.

“I did not realize how impacted our little city is because it is so based on concrete,” noted Anail. “My (part of the) city is in the red line,” she added.

The other students agreed with Anail that the last few months have been eye-opening. Until this unit, they did not know urban heat islands existed let alone that extreme heat is worst in areas that were historically redlined. The other thing they agreed on was that everyone else in Watsonville should be made aware of the problem too. Jazmyn laid out her hopes for her community.

“I want them to get a better idea of how it actually affects us in our daily lives, I want them to not feel negative because there are solutions to it, and I want them to come together as a community to plant more trees,” she said.

As a culminating project, student teams created podcasts to help educate their community. The podcasts, which they plan to submit to the KQED Youth Media Challenge, played the dual role of helping students process injustice and giving them a way to fight back against it. (Want a sneak peek before they’re live? Listen to Jazmyn and Mario’s submission here.)

Teaching Tough Topics: “Something We Need”

Ciandro says teaching tough topics helped her grow as a teacher.

“It helped me as an educator to teach something that is tough to teach. It is a different way of teaching, and it’s something we really need,” said Ciandro.“You have to do your best and hope you are going to do more good than harm.”