Section 5

As a class, discuss the data and data gathering process (slide). Have students share around the following questions. Consider having students individually jot notes around these questions and then share out as a class. 

• What surprised you about your data?
• What was challenging about gathering data?
• What worked? What didn’t? 
• What sources of variability did you hope to capture? 
• What would you do differently in this next iteration? 

Students will have an opportunity to work in their pairs to revise their plan, but you can take some brief time to brainstorm around a few issues students are having with data gathering to help them get ideas for their plan revisions. 

Let your students know that there are topics in this course that are sensitive or personal. In this case, looking at personal data is part of ourselves and can feel vulnerable to share. In other situations we will be looking at data that may affect us in different ways and can feel vulnerable or very personal as the data applies to our identity, our experiences, or a situation or someone close to us. We think it is important to approach these topics so that we can be informed and educated when we look at data. However, we want to keep in mind that we need to be sensitive to each other as we discuss these topics in class. Being sensitive in this case means being aware of how someone else may be feeling, not making jokes about the topic, listening to others to hear how they are experiencing the topic, understanding that emotions may come up for some of us that may not come up for others. As participants in this community, each of us need to own our impact on the learning community. This means that each of us must consider our impact before speaking, not just our intent. Even if we may have good intentions, we can still be hurtful to others in our language.

Share the Data Science Process visual and remind students that the process is iterative. Let them know that they asked a question, made a plan and began gathering data. Based on their experience they will now go back and make revisions to their question and plan to gather data. Depending on how their data gathering has gone, these revisions may be very minimal or more major. For some it may be gathering some additional data and for others it may involve revising their question significantly and restarting their data gathering. Set up students to work with their partner to revise and refine their plan based on their experiences and the class discussion in the activity Revise Data Gathering Plan (Handout 4). During this time they will make a copy of the slide they created and make revisions to their plan on the new slide.

Set students up to continue their data gathering over the next few days based on their revisions. Let them know when they will be bringing their final set of data to class. Over the next few days set aside a few minutes each day to check-in with students about their data gathering: see what questions students have and if they have any issues they need help resolving.