Back in 2017, I gave a talk in which I spoke of “data moves.” These are things we do to data in order to analyze data. They’re all pretty obvious, though some are more cognitively demanding than others. They range from things like filtering (i.e., looking at a subset of the data) to joining (making a relationship between two datasets). The bee in my bonnet was that it seemed to me that in many cases, instructors might think that these should not be taught because they are not part of the curriculum—either because they are too simple and obvious or too complex and beyond-the-scope. I claimed (and still claim) that they’re important and that we should pay attention to them, acknowledge them when they come up, and occasionally even name them to students and reflect explicitly on how useful they are.
Of course there’s a great deal more to say. And because of that I wrote, with my co-PI’s, an actual, academic, peer-reviewed article—a “position paper”; this is not research—describing data moves. Any of you familiar with the vagaries of academic publishing know what a winding road that can be. But at last, here it is:
Erickson, T., Wilkerson, M., Finzer, W., & Reichsman, F. (2019). Data Moves. Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, 12(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mg8m7g6.
Then, in the same week, a guest blog post by Bill Finzer and me got published. Or dropped, or whatever. It’s about using CODAP to introduce some data science concepts. It even includes figures that are dynamic and interactive. Check out the post, but stay for the whole blog, it’s pretty interesting:
https://teachdatascience.com/codap/
Whew.
A Best-Case Scenario 