Teaching Data Literacy With Creativity: The Dear Data Project in Middle School
Abstract
Building opportunities for students to interact with data in creative and novel ways builds curiosity, engagement, and data literacy skills. During participation in an NSF Research Experience for Teachers program, we focused on building our skills with data collection, analysis, and visualization. Dear Data was a key text used to help us explore data in a different way. In this article we provide three ways to implement Dear Data concepts in the middle school classroom, each with a different time commitment. We have found these activities engage students deeply, and the creativity of their work reflects this engagement.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Statistics Education and Methodologies
Science Education and Pedagogy
Literacy
Media
and Education
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Science Scope
- Volume
- 49
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 21–27
- Publication date
- 2 January 2026
- Language
- EN