At their core, young children are natural data scientists as they go about the business of observing, counting, organizing, and sorting information in their exploration of the world. We can harness this natural enthusiasm for data to help young children see themselves as data scientists and prepare them to use data science as a lens to view the world in their daily lives.
In order to support the development of data science activities for young children, the Early Childhood Data Science project organized a series of three workshops that brought together leading data education researchers, early childhood education researchers, and media researchers and developers with the purpose of building knowledge to achieve two related goals:
1) define the scope of the data skills children ages 4-7 are capable of attaining; and
2) identify strategies for effectively nurturing data skills in these early childhood years.
The result of these three workshops is an Early Childhood Learning Framework, consisting of an overarching learning goal, a set of eight related learning goals with subgoals and a set of data mindsets related to key social and emotional skills. These goals are accompanied by a set of vignettes of classroom data science activities that illustrate how the learning goals work together to engage students in data investigations. Also included are connections with several standards documents (Head Start, Common Core Math and Computer Science).
