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Research in the Age of COVID-19
Our Streams of Data project explores how third, fourth, and fifth grade students learn to make sense of data. Last fall, we carried out the first phase of our research – where we showed students photographs of rainfall, water-filled beakers, and rain collecting experiments and asked them to puzzle through how all of the photos might fit together. (Spoiler alert – they didn’t have enough information for there to be a single “correct” answer; the point was to get some insight into their thought process in coming up with a hypothesis.)
We spent the winter developing the second phase of research – in which we’d present the students with conventional representations of data, including maps and graphs, and see how they made sense of those representations and relate them to real-world phenomena. We were well along in our planning, having come to consensus as a team on a time series graph of stream height, a histogram of daily rainfall, and a color-coded map of weekly rainfall across the United States. We had finalized our interview protocols in preparation to return to classrooms in rural Virginia and Maryland…and the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
So for the past several weeks, in Zoom calls and on email (nothing new to this team, as the ten of us are scattered across eight different states!), we’ve been plotting and planning, working with our IRB staff, principals, science advisors and instructors, to come up with a new plan. We’ve been testing different software platforms – using each other (initially) and then borrowed kids from our friends (last week) – all in preparation to shift our interviews to online. We have materials being translated into different languages, so we can enlist the help of the parents willing to lend us a few minutes of their kids’ online learning time and help us keep this project moving forward.
In our trial runs last week, I was struck by three things: First, kids are smarter than we give them credit for. They were making sense of the data we showed them more quickly and accurately than most grown-ups would. Second, education researchers are amazing. Our team managed to keep kids engaged and enthused, saying things like, “That’s a great observation!” and “I’m impressed that you noticed that” at least a hundred different ways. (My personal favorite was, “That’s good noticing!”) Finally, we – all of us – are doing an amazing job of “making it work.” We have educators switching to remote instruction overnight; parents helping kids connect with their teachers and their classrooms in ways they never had before, while also reinventing their own work routines from home (for those of us lucky enough to still be working); and researchers shifting gears to collect data now so that we're ready for the next phase of research once the pandemic threat has lessened and students can return to their classrooms.
We're looking forward to returning to our in-person lives, but in the meantime we are "making it work" and hope you are too!
Be Well!
Randy Kochevar, Director
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