Programs should enable all children to:

Formulate questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer them

This can be demonstrated by the children in the following ways:

• pose questions and gather data about themselves and their surroundings;
• sort and classify objects according to their attributes and organize data about the objects;
• represent data using concrete objects, pictures, and graphs.

And…programs should enable all children to:

Select and use appropriate statistical methods to analyze data…

This can be demonstrated by the children in the following ways:

• describe parts of the data and the set of data as a whole to determine what the data show.

Sorting and classifying is something we do all the time with children.  We can have children sort nearly anything that we have many of.  It is easier for children to sort by one attribute at a time (for children under 4, only sort by one attribute at a time).  When putting the cutlery out for lunch, put it out in a pile, all mixed up with spoons, forks, and knives.  Have the children sort them before setting the table. There is a great lesson about this very idea in the Early Math Counts site.  Click here to see it.

There are a couple other lessons available in the Early Math Counts site about sorting and classifying.  Click here or here to check them out.

If you try any of them out, let us know how they go.

So, teaching data analysis to young children seems completely contradictory to me.  How do we look at data sets and make sense of it?

Young children need to collect data that is meaningful to them.  This can be in the form of scientific inquiry such as; how many sprinkler days did we have this summer?   or, what is everyone’s favorite kind of juice? The data can then be collected and categorized into data sets.  Usually, we want to explore ideas that yield manageable data sets for young children (2 – 3 sets, ideally).  In the case of favorite juices, children may say orange, apple, grape and possibly one other.

You should tally their responses by using visual cues that can be read by pre-readers. You might draw three glasses on the top of the tag board with one filled with orange, one filled with yellow and one filled with purple.  The colors will visually represent the juice and will make sense to the children.

Under each choice, the children can write their names to represent their choice, or if they are not ready to write, you could put their photos under their choices.  You have now created a usable data set that is analyzed by the children.  The analysis should be readily seen and understood by the children.  You can ask questions of the data, for example; Which juice is the favorite amongst our group?  Which juice is the least favorite?  How many children chose each kind? etc.

Next week we will continue looking at data analysis and the young child.