Engaging High School Students with Big, Messy, Current Data

Uncertainty is foundational to science but often feared in classrooms. Equally scary are big, messy data without clear trends or explanations. Climate data embody both of these daunting traits, but a teacher and a researcher embraced this daunting uncertainty to develop a meaningful learning progression for high school students. The duo collaborated to translate complex climate data into student-accessible formats shared on open platforms. They balanced complexity with accessibility and developed both a dataset and a scaffolded investigation guide for students. In this article, they share their development process, a summary of their implementation, their next steps, and considerations for others interested in bringing messy data into learning spaces.