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A three-year, $600,000 National Science Foundation grant to support a professional development program designed to improve data literacy of future teachers has been awarded to SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Michael Jabot and a colleague from The College of New Jersey.

A Data Visualization Experience for Preservice Teachers is designed to provide faculty in higher education with the instructional tools to teach their students enrolled in science education programs how to integrate data skills into their own classroom instruction at the K-8 level.

“The focus of the project is on how we can better prepare faculty who serve preservice teachers in using data in their classrooms,” said Dr. Jabot, a co-principal investigator with Dr. Melissa Zrada of The College of New Jersey.

“We want to set teachers up for success in teaching these critical skills,” SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Michael Jabot

“The majority of teacher education programs do not explicitly teach data literacy skills or how to teach those skills,” said Jabot, who teaches science education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

Jabot and Zrada have been developing ideas to improve data literacy of preservice teachers during the last three years as an outgrowth of their collaborative work in the NASA GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) program.

“We’ve piloted ideas with our own students and, based on this research we’ve refined our work for use in this professional development,” Jabot explained. Their overall objective is to have preservice teachers become comfortable with these kinds of skills. Both understanding data and learning how to present it in understandable ways will be emphasized.

A key part of the project is data visualization that includes, but is not limited to, bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts, as data can be presented in multiple ways.

“We want to set teachers up for success in teaching these critical skills,” Jabot said.