Assignment Guidelines
This assignment prompts students to create a short presentation (5 to 10-minutes) in which they blend data points and vivid examples to tell a story about a statistical trend that sheds critical light on a social issue they care about. The presentation can be delivered in-class or in the form of a screen-share video using software such as Zoom. In the “Telling Stories with Data” section of our website’s toolkit, there are four curated examples of data storytelling videos that can each serve as effective models for this student assignment. In the spirit of these models, students presentations should craft a narrative out of three essential “building block” materials they’ll need to gather over the course of their research:
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Data: statistics, charts, graphs, or other forms of data visualization (students may find these through online research, they don’t have to create any data visualizations themselves)
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Examples: more specific “stories,” anecdotes, or case studies that let enable the audience grasp real-life situations that illustrate or embody the patterns from the student’s selected data
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Concepts: a big idea, theory, or finding that offers the audience a broad insight to better our understanding of the issue (i.e., helps us understand the problem better, or perhaps helps us recognize a solution more clearly)
Selecting a Topic
Students may choose to research data about any social issue that interests them. It could be an issue or problem within a major political policy area (the economy, environment/climate, education, immigration, reproductive rights, crime, policing, healthcare, etc.). Alternatively, the topic could be something more local or “niche” that is quite specific to a student’s passion and has some importance within a particular community.
Basic Learning Objectives
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to illustrate what the selected data means and why it matters through the use of examples involving real people
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to tap into relevant research on the topic and identify a concept that helps explain what we’re seeing in the data and the examples you’ve chosen (OR: to present a research-informed solution to the problem that the data and examples have established)
Rubric:
You may use the following rubric (or any variation of it) to assess student’s data storytelling presentations.
[***Insert image of rubric here]