Leveraging Data with collaboration

Spring 2021

One of the greatest tips I've received about using technology is to use it to solve a problem that you are facing in your classroom. Don't use technology just to use it, or because it's the next new thing to try out. Really consider what you want to accomplish with your students, and then try and figure out how technology can help you accomplish that goal. Use tech to accomplish something that you wouldn't have been able to accomplish any other way. That is the basis for the story behind collaborative data sets.

Throughout my years as a teacher I was continuously encountering the same problem lab after lab with my students.

They would make claims that were from my perspective, shallow. My lab instructions were clear, “Discuss your results with other groups, then write your claim”. Even the students that I knew had discussed their results with other groups still seemed to have shallow, poorly constructed answers. I watched them "look" at the data of other groups, but they were still only making conclusions based on their own lab results. They didn’t seem to know that their results were incomplete, or even invalid.

Each year as I graded their papers, I would ask myself the same questions. Why aren’t they getting this? Why aren’t they seeing what I am seeing? The obvious answer, that I should have picked up on sooner was that students were not looking at all of the data the way I was looking at all of the data as I corrected every paper. The data was all on 80 different pieces of paper. Now I was getting to the real issue.

Collaborative Google Sheets to the rescue! A google sheet with the appropriate headings duplicated & renamed for each period of Biology I taught was all I needed. I posted it on Google Classroom for all of the students to access and edit and voila; students were on their way to better data analysis. But I didn’t stop there.

It turns out that having 10th graders look at 80+ pieces of data by themselves isn’t the most effective approach for teaching data analysis. So, I set aside class time to work with small groups of students specifically on data analysis. I was able to support them in learning how to filter the data, look for inconsistencies, and trends. Creating this opportunity for students to have conversations about all the data, allowed them to better see the natural connection between their data and their claims. The end result was exactly what I wanted for my students, much stronger well thought out conclusions. They started to look for trends in the data first and then determine what their claim was. Prior to this, students were doing the lab and just trying to figure out what their claim was so that they could turn in their lab report and be done. They weren't seeing the connections of all the parts of the lab report.

Overall, allowing students access to all the data and structuring the time they spent analyzing it, turned out to be much more successful than the original lesson. The students ended up taking a much deeper dive into the data and that produced some amazing and unexpected byproducts.

Students started seeing what I was seeing. They began asking scientific questions about their data that were testable. Some of them started seeing inconsistencies in the data collection and questioning how the procedures were written, perceived, and carried out. When they brought their concerns about it to the class, the class discussion took a whole new turn. All of a sudden they were interested in whether or not other students were correctly measuring and closely monitoring specific aspects of their lab. Some students became more aware of the lack of descriptive observations others had made that left them unsure about the data. Lastly, some of the students envisioned how they might change the conditions of the experiment and try it again even without prompting. Using the data as a resource, I was able to ensure that all students practiced that skill and were able to do it.

Read More About How to Plan This Type of Lesson Here...

I am sure if I reflected longer I could list many other improvements that I saw in student learning because I used the data in a collaborative way. And, I am sure as I tweak my approach in the upcoming year, I will see more improvements as well. But enough about me. Some of you may already be comfortable using Google sheets in this way and making the adjustment in your classroom might be a small change. But others that are excited by the possibility of increasing student engagement and critical thinking might be blocked by the obstacle of getting started using the tech. Have you used Google Sheets before? In what capacity? Have you tried creating a graph in sheets? Have you used the simple filter feature?