Digging Deeper into Schoolyards and Data

In the Next Generation Science Standards, there is sustained emphasis on working with data. Yet supporting elementary children’s meaningful work with data, in ways that engage local places, people, and processes central to young peoples' daily lives, while also digging deeper into disciplinary core ideas, remains a challenge for teachers and curriculum designers alike. In this article, we outline how opportunities were created for children to construct and contest data as part of a larger multi-week ecology unit, in ways that both elevated children’s local expertise and their intuitions about data. Key to this process was expanding the types of data children collected, centering the study of ecosystems around their schoolyard, and making maps as anchors for modeling and argumentation. We describe the core principles that informed this curricular approach, show how these principles were used to guide the design of a fourth- and fifth-grade curriculum, and reveal key insights children were able to gain about their schoolyard ecosystems. Connections to relevant science and math standards, along with select curricular materials, are provided.