Starting to Organize Data

Today, I gave the students access to the raw data. Wow - it was interesting how they started sifting through the information. This was the most challenging day for me in terms of stepping back and letting them develop ways to organize the data on their own. I wanted to shout "Just make a tally chart!" but watched as students made lists, developed their own codes, highlight and colour information, and discuss unexpected results ("Wow - this kid took 25 seconds for the reaction time question! I wonder why?"). I did see some students making tallies, using tables to organize their data, and even calculating the mean and median of their data (well they were figuring out a way to do this anyway). After about 15 minutes, I let the class know that they were allowed to walk around and check out how other groups are organizing their data and could ask questions to these other students if needed.

Below is a vine of today's exploration:

We didn't have any technology available today (so much for "leveraging digital"!) but in a sense I found the students were able to focus on the data and organization methods as opposed to worrying about formatting and tech issues. I ended up handing out a pocket portfolio to each group for them to store all of their work.

It was certainly an interesting experience. I didn't realize that "teacher-directed" was such an integral part of my teaching approaches. This is one more step towards letting my students direct their learning (moving from lecturer to facilitator).

I am sort of wondering where to go from this point... is it time for some student sharing, establishing co-constructed anchor charts, and some additional teacher prompting... or do I give it some more time and see what the students do? Tomorrow we have about 30 minutes to keep working through the data but I will give each group a Chromebook and a link to the data to see how they use the technology to help sift through. 

Choosing a Big Idea or Questions from the data

As a precursor to introducing the project and the survey data, I shared the results of a "getting to know you survey" that I had conducted the first week of school. Find the survey results HERE.

I had students look through the data and post their "wonderings" on a padlet (see below). Some of the questions were based on the data and some used the ideas in the data to spur new questions. 

We had a great discussion on how we can create questions without bias and, more importantly, if the questions may serve a purpose (other than mere curiosity). Following our conversation, I shared a PDF of the census at schools survey questions and had them post their wonderings on a new padlet. Some students came up with some intriguing questions to explore (e.g. does gender affect reaction time) and some were drawing blanks. I had the list of what I considered the more "meaty" survey questions (see previous post) to help prompt. 

The following is a list of student-generated questions (or big ideas) that they will be digging into over the next weeks. 

• Does geography (where we are born) affect the colour of our eyes?
• Does it take a shorter amount of time to get to school in 2014 then it did 10 years ago?
• Are more elementary kids choosing online communication (as opposed to person-to-person) to interact with their friends?
• Exploring local (St. Gabriel) and national opinions about why people bully.
• Does geography affect your height? Comparing heights of 10-year old boys in Canada, UK, and Japan.
• The languages we speak: is Canada really a bilingual nation?
• Are water bottles losing popularity?
• Dog or cat – which is the more popular pet?
• The popularity of Math (music, English) over the years
• In which season are the most babies born?
• How important is internet connectivity to elementary students?
• Investigating the effect of handedness and gender on reaction time.
• Do our breakfast choices follow the Canada Food Guide?
• Are Canadian girls taller than other girls around the world?
• Has the amount of Canadian children with allergies increased over the past 10 years?

Some students want to compare our school data to Canadian data. Some want to look at Canadian data over time, and some want to compare school data to international data. Some students are working independently and some are working in pairs (we have one group of 3).

Tomorrow, students will be developing their objective statements (basically a more detailed version of their question) and will be predicting what the data may look like for our school, Canada, and (if necessary) other countries. I plan to share the census at schools data with them on Monday.

Just as an aside, I am not formally teaching anything "data management" related leading up to this project. I want to see which learning objectives and big ideas the students will stumble across via their own learning. I will be tracking this as I observe it. Never having taught with this degree of student-centredness, I am finding it a bit frightening and liberating at the same time!

How is everyone else doing?

Introducing the Project to the Students

Today, I met with the other grade 5 teachers at my school. We are all completing the Census at School task. So far we have collected data from 58 grade five students at our school. We decided as a team that this is enough data and we do not need to track down those students (there are about 10 of them) who have yet to fill out the survey.

On Wednesday, we will be introducing the project to all of the grade fives. We discussed that we would start by re-visiting the survey questions (a PDF of the questions can be found HERE). We want students to explore a question, or combination of questions, that interests them. Saying that, we are anticipating that for some students, this may be too open-ended. We have created a list of possible questions that we will make available to students unable to determine a suitable exploration question on their own.

The list includes the following (dates refer to the year in which that question was added to the survey):

• In how many languages can you hold an everyday conversation? (2007)
• Do you have allergies?  (2004)
• Right-handed, left-handed or ambidextrous? (2005)
• What do you usually eat for breakfast? (2005)
• Why do you think some kids bully others? (2009)
• Which method do you use most often to communicate with friends? (2007)
• Primarily what type of water do you drink at home? (2007)
• Importance of Environmental Initiatives (2007)
• Importance of Technology (2007)

• What colour are your eyes?  (2003)
• How do you usually travel to school? (2004)
• How long does it usually take you to travel to school? (2003)
• What is your favourite subject? (2006)
• If you had $1,000 to donate to charity, what type of organization would you choose? (2005)
• Whom do you look up to? (2003)
• How many people usually live in your household? (2007)
• Which of the following pets do you have? (2004)

Students will be tasked with determining a question (either one from the survey or one they come up with based on the survey questions), explaining why they chose those questions, and make predictions (with supporting details) regarding the data for our school’s grade five population (sample size = 58). Once they have written their objectives and predictions, we will provide them a link to the school data.

The school data will be given in the form of a link to a viewable Google doc. Students can make a copy of the doc in order to manipulate it in their own Google drive. From here, teachers will be observing how the students use the data to fulfil their objectives. As all grade 5 students will be completing the project, we will be having students with similar questions conference together (our goal here is to explore the “Collaborative knowledge construction” dimension of the Critical Thinking competency).

This is just the initial launch. All of us here at St. Gabriel are excited to see how the students decide to use the data, collect the data, organize the data, and interpret the data. There are many directions that they could go and we are cognizant to allow the students to take the lead. Wish us luck!