EXPLORING THE PLIGHT OF THE HONEYBEE: USING DATA SENSORS AND CODAP TO SUPPORT EMERGING BILINGUAL LEARNERS IN REASONING ABOUT BIG STATISTICAL IDEAS

Children require access to high-quality statistics education to develop the skills to participate in a technological and data-reliant workforce. This study consisted of a five-lesson integrated STEM unit designed to develop the statistical literacy of 62 6th-grade (11–12 years old) emerging bilingual (EB) learners. Learning was situated in the study of the honeybee, utilising innovative technologies to gather data and support data visualisation and analysis. Lesson study was used to design lessons targeting understandings of distribution, centre, variability, data comparison, informal measures of association and informal inference. This paper reports on the data comparison lesson. It reveals the influential role of digital technologies in highlighting the relevance of statistics in understanding societal issues and developing students’ statistical agency. This qualitative study also revealed that the development of statistical understanding was supported by the use of inclusive pedagogies guided by the principles of universal design and the incorporation of data analysis technologies.