Children’s School parent and Psychology Department colleague Marsha Lovett is hosting the 33rd annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, entitled “Thinking with Data”.  What does it mean for you to think with data?  How do you think with data when you are working?  Spending time with family?  Driving?  Reading?

The educators at the Children’s School and at the Cyert Center for Early Education have been considering similar questions this year.  We have also wondered about the ways that our children think with data.  Broadly speaking, we have explored ways that children organize incoming information to find relevant patterns for understanding and adapting to the world around them.

For young children, data can be as simple as the vast amount of information that enters their brains via their senses.  For example, last week I babysat for a friend’s three-month-old son.  During one of his alert times, I laid him on his back under a plastic baby gym from which his mother had suspended a set of rattles easily within range of his flailing arms.  His pupils dilated fully as he looked intently at the vast array before him.  When one of his arms connected with the apparatus, he would turn his head in response to the touch and/or sound.  For fifteen minutes, he continued this sensory exploration and left me wondering how he was processing all of the input and what he had learned.

Perhaps it is easier to grasp older children’s thinking with data because they can talk with us about their experiences and represent them in other ways.  I hope that you had an opportunity to join us at the Family Festival on Thursday to see first hand some of the ways that our preschoolers have represented their learning about animals in the polar regions, the rainforest, and the temperate forest, as well as how the kindergartners continually deepened their thinking about diverse birds.  In this column, I’ll share a few anecdotes that impressed me about their “thinking with data”, but I encourage you to consider the question yourself.  We will also present some of our reflections on this question with respect to our animal unit during our Week of the Young Child exhibition at the University Center in April.

Given the overwhelming whiteness of polar bears’ appearance (the initial data), our 3 year olds had a difficult time understanding that the polar bear’s skin is, in fact, black.  To help them think about this paradox, the teachers worked with them to paint a large polar bear shape black and then to cover it with white collage materials provided by the families.  This experience gave them new data that helped to reconcile the conflict between their visual perceptions and the skin color fact.

The four year olds utilized a common experiment with celery to initiate discussion about the ways that large rainforest plants can transport water and other nutrients vast distances to support life at all four of the rainforest layers.  Interestingly, some of the children then carried that knowledge into the extended day discussions of temperate forest trees and decided to design their own root system for the tree model they built.  Though they clearly know that the roots are, in fact, under the ground, they are shown at ground level (bottom left of the photo, in and around the climber) so that the guests at the Family Festival could see how they provide a home for hibernating animals.

Note that the Extended Day children also wanted to represent their understanding that different animals would be visible in the tree during the day (frogs, toads, rabbit and bear with blue sky and sun on the right) and at night (bats and owls with dark sky and moon on the left).

The kindergartners began their investigation of birds by observing Lemon Spice, my family’s 7-year-old Cinnamon Pied Cockatiel.  They asked lots of questions and pursued answers through dialogue and reading.  Photographs from a variety of sources provided lots of visual data, and non-fiction books added information about habitats, lifestyles, and unique adaptations.  The children also explored beak adaptations by trying to lift a variety of foods from a tray using beak-like tools such as clothespins, toothpicks, etc.  They searched for data about owl diets by dissecting “owl pellets”, regurgitated waste from owl meals.  Each child then used the concepts gained via these diverse experiences to design very realistic paper maché replicas of one favorite bird.  Groups of children whose birds live in similar habitats then created Kindergarten Aviary exhibits to house their birds and explain key facts about them.

In all of these cases, the children’s “thinking with data” involves lots of observation, extended dialogue, and then documentation in a variety of media.  Though the length and depth of investigation varies somewhat with age, there is evidence of rich conceptual gains throughout.  That’s the power of thinking with data at any age!