Camillia Matuk

As a creative endeavor, scientific research requires inspiration, innovation, exploration, and divergent thinking. Yet, in K-12 settings, it is often viewed as rigid and formulaic. MindHive is a web-based platform designed to facilitate student-teacher-scientist partnerships in research on human behavior. Features support research phases (e.g., question finding, study design, peer review, iteration), and their creative dimensions, including exploration, expressiveness, collaboration, and enjoyment. Interviews with teachers and students who used MindHive show how learners describe their experiences as creative agents. This work illustrates how educational technologies can broaden STEM participation by being authentic to methodical and creative aspects of STEM research.

In higher education, while there's an emphasis on training students in diverse research methods and offering hands-on experimental research experience, traditional textbooks often miss real-world intricacies, especially with human subjects. Recently, gamified techniques using interactive narratives have emerged as a popular teaching tool, allowing students to design experiments within a storyline and gather real-world data. Despite their promise, challenges persist in conveying complex terminology, biases, and methods, and in seamlessly integrating research questions into these narratives. Additionally, ensuring aesthetic coherence and tracking variable manipulations add layers of complexity. With the advent of AI tools like feedback providers, question generators, and chatbots in classrooms, this paper, based on workshops and instructor interviews, seeks to outline the potential of AI in enhancing the teaching and learning experience of experimental research using interactive narratives.

Open data programs have become increasingly established at national and local levels of government. While the degree of success these programs have had in achieving their objectives remains open to question, one factor that has been identified as important to any success is the role of open data intermediaries, individuals and organizations that help others to make use of open data. In this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively. We interview participants from a variety of backgrounds with differing levels of experience and engagement with open data. Participants include students learning how to train others in open data techniques and tools; people who attend open data events and use open data for commercial or social benefit; and representatives from local government, municipal agencies and a civic tech non-profit. We identify pathways to successfully developing and nurturing a community of open data intermediaries, and make five recommendations for organizations planning and managing open data programs.

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Data‐art inquiry is an arts‐integrated approach to data literacy learning that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of data literacy not often taught in school contexts. By layering critical reflection over conventional data inquiry processes, and by supporting creative expression about data, data‐art inquiry can support students' informal inference‐making by revealing the role of context in shaping the meaning of data, and encouraging consideration of the personal and social relevance of data. Data‐art inquiry additionally creates alternative entry points into data literacy by building on learners' non‐STEM interests. Supported by technology, it can provide accessible tools for students to reflect on and communicate about data in ways that can impact broader audiences. However, data‐art inquiry instruction faces many barriers to classroom implementation, particularly given the tendency for schools to structure learning with disciplinary silos, and to unequally prioritize mathematics and the arts. To explore the potential of data‐art inquiry in classroom contexts, we partnered with arts and mathematics teachers to co‐design and implement data‐art inquiry units. We implemented the units in four school contexts that differed in terms of the student population served, their curriculum priorities, and their technology infrastructure. We reflect on participant interviews, written reflections, and classroom data, to identify synergies and tensions between data literacy, technology, and the arts. Our findings highlight how contexts of implementation shape the possibilities and limitations for data‐art inquiry learning. To take full advantage of the potential for data‐art inquiry, curriculum design should account for and build on the opportunities and constraints of classroom contexts. Practitioner notes: What is already known about this topic Arts‐integrated instruction has underexplored potential for promoting students' data literacy, including their appreciation for the role of context and real‐world implications of data and for the personal and social relevance of data. Arts‐integrated instruction is difficult to implement in school contexts that are constrained by disciplinary silos. What this paper adds Descriptions of four data‐art inquiry units, which take an arts‐integrated approach to data literacy. Examples of the synergies and tensions observed between data literacy, technology, and the arts during classroom implementation in four different schools. Reflections on the role of school contexts in shaping disciplinary synergies and tensions. Implications for practice and/or policy Arts‐integration offers opportunities for data literacy learning. Consideration of the unique resources and constraints of classroom contexts is critical for fulfilling the promises of data‐art inquiry learning. There is a need to develop school support specific to arts‐integrated data literacy instruction.