Simply getting students to graph data often leaves no time for getting into the higher order skills of analysis and interpretation...and that’s a problem.

My 10th grade biology students had just completed the classic heart-rate/exercise lab and I was left wondering why it fell so short of the learning experience I had planned for them. Despite the great data that my students collected, I had failed yet again to budget sufficient time to really dive into the data analysis with the class. Graphing the data always took longer than expected. As I graded lab report after lab report with unfinished graphs and insufficient analysis I was frustrated that I was not able to structure the two days of class time dedicated to the lab in a way that allowed most students to engage in meaningful analysis of the data. 

My students spending entirely too much time on the act of making graphs and then not having the time to work through higher order analysis was a longstanding problem for me as a science teacher. Through working on DataClassroom, I have realized that this was not just my problem. 

I have heard from teachers around the world who want their students to spend a bit less time simply making graphs and more time thinking about the stories that data can tell:

“I heard constant lamenting about how difficult--and frankly, boring--data analysis was to complete in Microsoft Excel. The task felt totally inaccessible for young scientists. Google Sheets was more visually stimulating, but performing tasks outside of pre-loaded features required a lot of tinkering with spreadsheet data input. Their experience working with data took such a long time to set up and navigate that the joy of the analysis and excitement of the result was almost entirely lost.

It wasn’t until I discovered DataClassroom that I felt like I had finally found the right tool for the job for me and my students.”

Bob Kuhn, Science Teacher, Roswell, GA

“As I started to explore Data Classroom, I saw many ways the students could organize their data and graph it easily. The students can also add their own data and the program helps them to quickly organize it and prepare it for graphing. We could then get to the key issue of analyzing it, and figuring out what it was telling us. I was so happy to see that for the graphs they create in DataClassroom, the students pick the independent and dependent variables and think about what that means. They also determine the types of data sets they have. Are the data categorical? Numerical? Something else? They also can play with the data, and with a click can graph the data in several ways, some correct, and some not so much! This gives us a lot to talk about.”

Trudy Pachon, Science Teacher, San Diego, CA

“I find that I am telling them less what their data says and they are telling me more what it says. We can do the lab and I can say you need to go home and you need to analyze this data and they can do it through DataClassroom on their own, and they come back for that next class period and we don’t need to take the entire class period to analyze the data. We can talk about what the data says and what it means overall, instead of having to start at the very beginning.”

Anna Minutella, Science Teacher, Charlottesville, VA

DataClassroom is designed to reduce the drudgery and ‘buttonology’ often associated with data analysis, but it is also designed to make the difficult stuff interesting.

After all, if the students still have plenty of mental energy left once they’ve made a graph, might at well use it for learning, right?

Aaron Reedy

Cofounder + CEO

Sign up for a webinar or a personal demo, browse our User Guide, or register on the app and try it out for yourself.