34EDUCATION Data Lens: A new data literacy campaign using Visual Thinking Strategies and NOAA's SOS Explorer

As a U.S. Federal science agency charged with monitoring and forecasting a wide variety of Earth system processes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manages a lot of data. These data have important uses scientifically and operationally, but also can be used in education settings, both formal and informal. To help educators and learners of all ages understand these data, we have developed visualization and delivery techniques specifically for these audiences. Our education-focused data catalog contains nearly 600 visualizations of real-time earth science data, past observations, and models that forecast the future. To facilitate use of these global visualizations, we have created platforms that enable interactive viewing, interrogating, and comparing of these data on spherical platforms, both virtual and physical. NOAA’s Science On a Sphere (SOS) is a 6-foot diameter sphere onto which projectors create a seamless image of our dynamic planet. It is used by museums, universities, and K-12 schools as an educational exhibit. This year we made widely available a virtual sphere viewer for home and classroom use, SOS Explorer.

During this session, we will discuss feedback we received that informed the release of this virtual sphere viewer that has important implications for other education programs promoting use of data and visualizations. Also, we will present results from an ongoing NSF-funded education research project, Building Insights through Observation, that is examining arts-based approaches for teaching and learning with authentic data using SOS Explorer. We’ll share the initial outcomes for teachers and students from this research, suggesting the arts-based pedagogy supports science classroom discussions of visualizations and produces learning results. In particular, these techniques have been reported by teachers as changing their classroom culture: making students more curious and intrigued, and encouraging students who normally participate less to be more engaged. We will share the data literacy skill-building techniques, associated curriculum (which is adaptable to a variety of earth science topics), and a digital toolbox that has been created to support middle school science teachers. We will also detail lessons learned in our efforts to improve data literacy.