
Students can be great at collecting data. But once they have a table of data, many are not sure how to proceed. As teachers, we often toss students data in different forms to analyze and interpret: pre-made graphs, data collected during labs, small tables of data to graph by hand, or tables of data to graph in Excel or Google sheets. We hope they will “analyze” the data and come up with meaningful insights and explanations of the data as evidence. But we are often discouraged by what students hand in. What does one actually do when analyzing data? More precisely, what are some of the decisions that students can wrestle with and come to own as they turn a table of data into evidence and useful information?
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