Experiences with Activities Developing Pre-service Science Teacher Data Literacy

In this chapter we report on three examples of inquiry investigation activities used within each of our “science methods” courses, where we attempted to model what was expected of pre-service teachers in reformed science classrooms, while at the same time providing the students themselves experiences with engaging in an inquiry investigation environment. We provide a detailed elaboration of each example activity, descriptions of student work with examples of data collected and comments recorded in class. Our analysis of common themes within these examples shows that many pre-service teachers have varying degrees of difficulty in working with data in these (quite different) inquiry activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for pre-service teacher education in science.