Data is everywhere and it serves as a means to help us understand ourselves and the world we live in.
The process of learning about Data Management begins in primary through experiential learning opportunities where young children learn to sort, survey their classmates, record the results from a game or experiment and learn to read simple charts and graphs. As students get older, they learn about Data Management in a more theoretical or inferential way. They learn the purpose of different charts/graphs and how to think about the data presented in them with a critical lens. Through this process we learn life long skills that enable us to draw conclusions, make inferences, and make predictions from data when it is presented to us.
There are many opportunities to develop these skills with young children at home. Simple tasks can help young children learn to sort and can easily be done through play, daily tasks, or chores that children can help with around the house. Sorting socks for the family while doing laundry, organizing blocks by size, or markers by colour will all help children learn how to organize information into meaningful categories. Allow children to describe their sorting rule and find new ways to re-sort the objects into new categories are experiences that support a deeper understanding of Data Management.
It is crucial that children learn to interpret and analyze data in a meaningful way so they are equipped with the skills to determine the reliability and accuracy of the information. Data presented through different media forms such as the daily news or magazines provide great opportunities to have important discussions with your children about the information that is being presented to them. After reading the graph/chart/survey results together you might ask, How reliable do you think the results are? Is there any information that might be misleading? Why do you think they presented this information this way? Why do you think they used that particular scale to display their information? These are just a few ways to help children think critically about information presented to them.
Primary Task:
How might you sort a set of toys or crafts into different categories to make it easier to find ones they want to use? What is going to be your sorting rule? How many categories are you going to create? Is there more than one way to sort?
Junior Task:
How might you record and organize the following results to share with others?
- The results of flipping two coins 100 times
- The results of predicting how many times you will roll two dice with the sum of 7
Intermediate Task:
Picturing the World (from nRich)