Surveys for Sustainability

As the demand for data scientists continues to rise in STEM fields, teacher educators play a critical, but often overlooked, role in preparing elementary science teachers to cultivate data-literate students. In response to this need, we developed an innovative data science lesson for elementary preservice teachers (PTs) grounded in the 5-ESS3-1 performance expectation and its related three-dimensional learning components. Using the STEM project-based learning framework, we outline our lesson in which PTs identified a campus conservation issue, researched and refined it, designed and piloted a survey, collected and analyzed responses, and presented their findings and recommendations to university leadership for potential implementation. Finally, we briefly share how PTs reflected on their progress in developing data science skills in relation to the performance expectation and explored how these skills can be integrated into the classroom to nurture future data scientists.