Engaging Pre-Service Teachers in Front-End Design: Developing Technology for a Social Studies Classroom

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Abstract
This research full paper presents front-end design activity with social studies pre-service teachers to inform the design of data visualization technology tools. Data visualizations are powerful tools that social studies teachers use to explore the narratives they want their students to learn. They can serve as evidence for historical arguments and prompts that start students on a path of inquiry. The ability to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and use data and data visualizations – known as data literacy – has become an increasingly important component of K-12 social studies education in recent years.While there are many technological innovations that have been developed to support engineering education in K-12 classrooms, adoption of these tools has been low. Our hypothesis is that adoption may improve if teachers are involved in the front-end design process of technology intended for use in their classrooms. This work describes the results of two Participatory Design (PD) sessions about data visualization with pre-service social studies teachers.In our design sessions, thirty-two pre-service teachers evaluated programming and non-programming data visualization experiences, and then told us what they would like in future data visualization tools. The Minimal Manual was used as a guide in the design of the activity sheets to scaffold use of the tools. After each PD session, we used conjecture mapping to process and analyze the data.Although there were minor design differences in the two PD sessions, the pre-service teachers’ evaluations were surprisingly different from one another. These results suggest that PD sessions might be highly idiosyncratic, and we cannot reliably generalize from just a single PD session. We found that secondary focused pre-service teachers tended to be more interested in the data visualization tools than elementary focused pre-service teachers. Further sessions and analysis are necessary to make more reliable conclusions about the characteristics pre-service social studies teachers would like to see in a pedagogical tool they would consider adopting in their classroom. Our work informs other researchers who are considering PD for developing K-12 education interventions.

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