Teacher Education for Data Science: How Teachers Integrate Data Science into Their Instruction for Middle-Grades Learners

This paper presents the Teacher Education for Data Science (TEDS), a study conducted with a cohort of teachers who developed methods to incorporate data fluency approaches into teaching and learning across multiple middle school subjects. The objective of this study is to investigate how teachers integrate data science pedagogy into their instruction for middle-grade learners. In a four-session online professional development sequence, teachers learned to use a web-based collaborative data visualization platform; developed a data-intensive lesson for their existing middle school curriculum; implemented the lesson(s) with their students; and shared reflections with fellow teachers and the researchers.This paper shares the design of the professional development sequence, explores the capabilities of the data visualization platform, and examines three examples of data-intensive projects created by the teachers: a paper airplane engineering activity (science class); a "travel agency" vacation planning activity (life skills class); and a volcano research activity (science class).We describe how we supported the teachers in a responsive co-design process. The data collected included teacher-created instructional artifacts, and 30-minute post-teaching interviews, focusing on their lesson design process and student responses to data-intensive approaches.Teachers reported on student agency as they entered data into the collaborative platform and discovered real-world connections in their data. To deepen middle school learners’ engagement and fluency with data, we recommend expanding teachers’ access and familiarity with technology-supported pedagogical approaches. Integrating data science into the curriculum broadens opportunities for both teachers and students, fostering critical thinking and deeper engagement with the world around us.