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Episode No. 113: What’s Going On in This Graph?
175 Plays7 years ago
Michael Gonchar and Sharon Hessney lead a new project at the New York Times called “What’s Going On in This Graph?” (WGOITG). Every second Tuesday of every month, the NYT publishes a graphic on a topic suitable for subjects across...
The post Episode No. 113: What’s Going On in This Graph? appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we're going to talk about teaching data visualization and getting students and younger people to understand how to read data visualizations in and out of
Meet the Guests: Sharon Hesney and Michael Goncher
00:00:25
Speaker
context. And to help me do that, I'm very excited to have the two managers, I'm going to call them, of the what's going on in this graph project from the New York Times.
00:00:33
Speaker
First off, I have Sharon Hesney, who's a former Boston school teacher and works with Massachusetts teachers and students to help them learn statistics and data and data visualization. Sharon, welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. I'm also happy to have Michael Goncher, who is the deputy editor of the New York Times Learning Network. Michael, also welcome to the show. Hi, John. Glad to be here.
00:00:53
Speaker
Thanks to you both for coming on. I'm loving this project and we're going to get to that in
Mission of the NYT Learning Network
00:00:58
Speaker
a moment. But I wanted to at least give Michael a moment to talk about the New York Times Learning Center because I think this is a valuable or maybe invaluable resource that maybe folks don't really know that the Times is doing. So can you tell us just a little bit about the network?
00:01:14
Speaker
Sure, so even regular times readers may not know about the Learning Network, but we're a part of the digital site, newyorktimes.com, and our mission is to help teachers and students teach and learn with the times. So that could mean teaching about the immigration ban or political news, what's going on in North Korea, but it also can include sports and pop culture. And we offer lesson plans, we have daily student writing prompts, we have a documentary film club,
00:01:43
Speaker
and offer contests all year long. In fact, tomorrow we're starting our 15-second vocabulary video contest connected to our word of the day feature. So that in a nutshell is what we do, but we really offer four to five different features every single day.
00:01:59
Speaker
Wow. And is there a focus, are you focusing on K to 12, or is it broader than that? Well, I think our main audience would be high school students, just based on COPA laws. 13-year-olds and up can participate in our online conversations, can comment and register at the times. So we would really say probably from 13 to 19, but we also have college students and even adult learners participating. But it's really mostly high school and middle school.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. That's great.
Overview of 'What's Going On in This Graph' Project
00:02:30
Speaker
Super important and valuable. And I'll have to get my daughter on the word of the day since she's already getting ready for her school spelling bee at the end of the year. I want to talk about this relatively new project, what's going on in this graph. So Sharon, can you give us a little bit of background description of the project? Yeah, the New York Times has some of the most phenomenal graphs of any publication there is.
00:02:52
Speaker
And they're incredibly useful in understanding what's going on in this world. So as a classroom teacher, in the good old days, I used to throw it up under the overhead.
00:03:02
Speaker
and what's going on with this graph. And we would do this at the beginning of the class. This is an opportunity now to do it seriously around the world. We have had participants from everywhere and to give them an opportunity to look at a graph that we feel they can relate to, that's timely, that's approachable to them and have them answer three questions. What do you notice in this graph? What do you wonder from this graph?
00:03:33
Speaker
And what do you think is going on? So can you talk a little bit about how they do this project both online and then also within the classrooms?
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, so on Thursday, we release the monthly graph. The monthly graph is the second Tuesday of the month, okay? And it's every month through the school year. The Thursday prior to that Tuesday, the New York Times releases the graph and announces it in its newsletter. So if you go to Learning Network, you can sign up for the Friday newsletter. But it's on Tuesday starting at nine o'clock in the morning.
00:04:07
Speaker
that we have myself and another American Statistical Association moderator. This is a partnership between the American Statistical Association and the New York Times. And we moderate the responses from the students.
00:04:20
Speaker
What we highly suggest to the teachers is that they show the students the graph, and they have them do what we kind of know is pair and share, which is have them come up with answers to what do you notice, what do you wonder, and what's going on, and share them in the class, because it's by sharing in the class that students can gain information from their classmates and have deeper critical thinking.
00:04:45
Speaker
And then upon doing that, one of two things happens. Some teachers just type in their responses for the whole class in one response. Most teachers, however, have their students type in their responses. And you can do it on an iPhone. You can do it on an iPad, computer, whatever you want. And then we respond. We're particularly pleased when students respond to each other, which is possible, and when they respond to us again.
00:05:11
Speaker
And this kind of goes on until two o'clock in the afternoon. Students can forever respond. They don't even have to be that way because everything is archived. But on that Friday of the week that we release, we have a reveal. And when we reveal,
In-Classroom Implementation and Strategies
00:05:28
Speaker
We show them where the graph came from and give them a full article free of charge and have some additional questions that we ask them. And then finally, we give them something called stat nuggets, which are statistical terms that they can see in the graph and we explain them.
00:05:43
Speaker
So I'm going to assume that it's the same age range target as the 13 to 18 year old. So this is like seventh grade and up. So a couple of questions about really putting this in place in the schools. Have you talked to teachers or when you work with teachers and they sign up, have you found there to be some best practices about how they are implementing this project into their classrooms?
00:06:07
Speaker
Uh, we've talked to some teachers, but realize it's really global. The strategy of what do you notice? What do you wonder what's going on actually comes from Annie Fetter at the math forum and the national council of teachers of mathematics. And it's a strategy that teachers use in the mathematics classroom, though, quite frankly, it could be used in any classroom. Yeah.
Outreach and Accessibility Initiatives
00:06:29
Speaker
So that it's, it's something they recognize and they're just continuing to do.
00:06:34
Speaker
with this instead of a textbook. Right. So I don't want to dive too deep into, you know, inequalities across New York City or across the world when it comes to education. But this is an online project. So Michael, does the times try to reach out to schools that may not have computers or broadband access? I mean, is there that outreach effort?
00:06:56
Speaker
Well, the big outreach effort that's been going on in the past year is through the sponsorship program. I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but I believe, and I don't know the exact number, but I think over two million public high school students have received free subscriptions this year from sponsorship dollars. So, that's certainly one way that we've reached out to schools across the United States.
00:07:23
Speaker
But just from looking at the comments and just hearing from teachers, we know that we have students from all states and different types of communities participating, not just in this feature, but just on the Learning Network in general. So this project is about visualizing data and understanding graphs and also about statistics. So are you seeing teachers trying to merge those two skill sets together, or is it still sort of a siloed approach?
00:07:52
Speaker
I don't know what we're seeing. It wouldn't surprise me if it were siloed. But the thing I feel very positive about is usually statistics is that chapter you do the three days before the standardized exam in your state.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, right. Okay, and maybe you don't even get there. This makes it possible that you can, from the archives, you can do it any day of the week, but at least once a month, statistics is being presented in a way that's engaging. I mean, we make a really good effort that the content of the graphs are interesting to the students.
00:08:27
Speaker
So it was during Christmas time, you know, it was about e-commerce. Okay. And after the hurricanes, it was about amount of rain and we've had it on.
00:08:37
Speaker
What foods do you think are nutritious? All kinds of things that we think actually engaged students. Last month, when students started hearing from colleges, it was expected earnings by major. Okay, so. And what we really hope is that these graphs ideally aren't just being used in mathematics or statistics classrooms, but that they could be used
00:08:59
Speaker
in social studies or even English classrooms. The graph that we've coming up, I think we publish it, or at least the moderation is taking place on February 13th, the day before Valentine's Day, will be related to the issues of love and relationships. So that would be, I think, our ideal is that this kind of interpretation and reading of graphs can take place across the curriculum.
00:09:21
Speaker
Right, as they should,
Sister Project: Visual Literacy Through Photos
00:09:22
Speaker
as data pervades all of these sorts of areas and blending them together is probably good for students. I also want to ask about sort of a sister project to this, which is what's going on with this picture, which I think preceded what's going on with this graph. That started in 2012.
00:09:38
Speaker
So I'm going to ask you sort of a two-part question. So first, can you describe what's going on in this picture? And then second, your view on how these two are comparable or not comparable in terms of you are taking New York Times graphs and you are, for some of them, you are taking some things out, like maybe some annotation or maybe a title or this or that, so that it's not obvious what the content is. And
00:10:06
Speaker
So is it comparable in the sense that is the graph you're taking it really out of context and the picture maybe it stands on its own? I don't really know but so there's really a two-part question there. So Michael's hoping you could sort of introduce that what's going on in this picture project and then we can talk about the comparison picture. Sure, so in what's going on in this picture we take a photograph that's been published in the New York Times at some point
00:10:28
Speaker
And we strip it of its caption and related articles so that all students have to do is look closely at the image and see what they see. And for that, we really try to pick what we think are intriguing images or puzzling images, but they have enough detail that students can tell some kind of story about the image and put together what's going on. And then, similar to what's going on in this graph, we then do a reveal at the end of the week.
00:10:52
Speaker
And with what's going on in this graph, we similarly take a graph from the Times that's been published in the Times, and we remove its context, we remove the article that it was part of, and we ask students to look closely. Now you had mentioned that for the graphs, we sometimes even do more than just remove the context. So for example, we might remove, I believe in the hurricane, the one that we published after Hurricane Harvey, I think we removed the title for that one. Sometimes we will remove some explanatory text, like in our nutrition graph,
00:11:21
Speaker
there were almost like little explanation text or bubbles that might say something like 70% of nutritionists think that granola bars are unhealthy and 30% of Americans think, my numbers make stuff. But it's really trying to make it easy for Times readers to understand these graphs, whereas our purpose is for this to be an educational exercise. I mean, that's our mission. And so we will tweak the graphs slightly, whether removing those small pieces
00:11:51
Speaker
To further the larger purpose, which is to make this more of an educational experience for students.
00:11:55
Speaker
Right.
Impact on Student Literacy and Numeracy
00:11:56
Speaker
When I think about a graph, I want all those parts to hang together. I want the annotation, I want the title, and I want the colors all to hang together as one whole piece. I don't know if it's similar to taking a photo and say, cropping something out, you know, taking the photo that's already been published and cropping something out. But it's interesting to me to think about the comparing the two and what is a visual image. And when we take either of these images out of context, how does the perception change?
00:12:24
Speaker
I guess part of this new project is about teaching people how to read a graph. There's a couple complex things that we often see in graphs. People have spent a lot of time with data. This is really familiar. But for your K through 12 student, mostly junior high and high school, things like the difference between number and proportion and the difference between net change and percentage change. So there's a lot of focus on, can you read the axes? And do you know what they're really saying?
00:12:54
Speaker
And then getting to the writing piece, can you then explain it? So students are really inclined, for example, to say the percentage went from 30 to 40 percent, therefore there are now more.
00:13:09
Speaker
We all know that if the percentage changes, there could be more. But what happens if the total population were bigger than actually be less. And so it's that kind of thing that we're trying to work for in the recent when we do the responses and talking to the students as well as later when we do the reveal. You've done a few now. Are you finding that people
Increasing Teacher Participation
00:13:30
Speaker
are keying out on some of these common attributes or themes? Somewhat.
00:13:36
Speaker
You know, one of the problems is, so you walk into your class and you do it at 9.23 for the next 15 minutes, and then you go to the Pythagorean theorem or, you know, protecting a frog, and then you go off to French. What we really hope is that the teacher at least reads the responses that come out, and possibly the second day says, you know, Mary, your response had one of the moderators talk about it, and now let's see what they had to say.
00:14:05
Speaker
We keep on working on it. We actually have seen an increase in quality over the first five months as people start focusing in on what is important in the graph and statistics.
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, let me ask you this. If you were both the Secretary of Education and you had heart-blanched through whatever you wanted with this particular part of the educational process and the funding was unlimited, how would you really bring this into schools, this visual literacy, this statistical literacy? How would you take this project and make it a core part of the educational process?
00:14:40
Speaker
Well, I was just going to say that, I mean, specific to this project, what's going in this graph, I mean, if we had unlimited resources, I would love to be able to make a video of a classroom doing what Sharon was describing before. I mean, I think a lot of teachers might have some
00:14:57
Speaker
trepidation about entering into this. And I think seeing another teacher in action or hearing from that teacher about their experience can go a long way. We found with what's going on in this picture, in the first year, we maybe would have 100 or 150 comments on average per image. And by the next year, I think it doubled. It's almost doubled each year. So now we're getting, I think, one photo got almost 2,000 comments this year.
00:15:21
Speaker
So I think what happens is that you do this for a year and then you'll find a whole batch of new teachers coming on. I think the way that they do that is, you know, my guess is that a lot of teachers are sort of putting their toe in the water. Maybe they're hearing about this. But I think to have some sort of professional development that included other teachers who are doing this or seeing other teachers do this in action would really go a long way for teachers, I think, to be more comfortable putting this in their classroom.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, Sharon, you were both school teachers before your current positions, but let me ask Sharon to start in your experience where.
00:15:56
Speaker
their teachers who maybe were teaching French who are not, or a non-statistical, non-mathemat class, were they reluctant to engage in some of these other sorts of skill sets, even though they can easily apply to social studies or to history or to literature? Yeah, and they were reluctant probably for two reasons. One is it's not what they're really trained in. But realize if the questions are what do you notice, most people can notice something in a graph.
00:16:25
Speaker
What do you wonder? Most people do wonder. So that's the entry. The other thing is let's not forget the standardized testing that's required in the schools and they have a certain curriculum to cover over a certain period of time. And so clearly statistics would probably not be part of an English classroom. But imagine if on February 13th, this coming month,
00:16:47
Speaker
English teachers looked at our graph, which has to do with males and females in their use of words when they describe modern love. Okay. What a great assignment to write about this. Have the whole class discuss what they notice and wonder in this graph. Have that like 10 minutes.
00:17:07
Speaker
and then say, you know, go home, the assignment or in the classroom, whatever. I want you to write for 15 minutes and tell me what is going on here. It would be a great writing experience for any English classroom. And I think would
Development of Additional Resources
00:17:20
Speaker
help them on standardized tests too, so.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah. And how do you promote that? So Michael, you had talked about the learning network as helping teachers develop best practices for how to use different types of projects within the learning network. So is a long-term plan to develop a syllabus or a teaching strategy to use what's going on with this graph? Well, I mean, one idea that we've, that Sharon and I actually just discussed last week is perhaps publishing a lesson in the spring to help teachers get started for next fall.
00:17:50
Speaker
on how to use graphs in the New York Times and how to use this noticing and wondering and providing some specific teaching strategies like the parent share that Sharon was talking about earlier. So I think that's something that we're considering for the spring. And also realize that we have, I don't know, maybe a dozen, I don't know how many features we actually have at the Learning Network, but we have a lot. And so for each one, we try to, it takes time to develop these tools.
00:18:18
Speaker
And since we use a platform, like a news platform for publishing, sometimes our resources get lost, so we'll republish and have to add a new spin. So this is a pretty new feature for us, and we've only published, I think, one, two, three, four, five graphs so far. So I think over time we want to develop this. We feel like it's been going very successfully and add some teaching resources, perhaps even a webinar. We've done six webinars so far on how to teach with visual images and how to teach with our writing prompts.
00:18:47
Speaker
So perhaps that's something that we can consider going on in the future, but it does take time. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that three questions are great and something that I'm probably going to try to do in my teaching with graduate students in public sessions as well. One of the last questions I wanted to ask was on whether you think this project by forcing students to think carefully about
00:19:10
Speaker
data represented visually, whether that itself can help improve graphic literacy, which I think it clearly will, but also numeracy and statistical understanding in these classrooms. I would say absolutely. Absolutely. You know, if you present a graph that students have just a natural interest in,
00:19:31
Speaker
We're not doing things, to be honest, about prostate cancer. That's not what high school students are interested in, okay? But if we have something that they're actually interested in, they'll keep going on. We had one on labor participation rates across countries over the last 20-odd years, and that doesn't sound very engaging, does it?
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, to me, it does. But you know, I'm an economist. So what was interesting was all the lines were kind of going up. The United States line was going down. And that grabbed people's attention. Yeah. And so that's a notice. I know it's going down. And then the wonder is, I wonder why it's going down.
00:20:12
Speaker
And we had all kinds of answers, including technology and trade agreements, but then we had a whole discussion about are Americans lazier than they ever were? Because that's what's going on with this graph. And it turned out to be a graph that we had an enormous participation in and responses back and forth. So you would have to believe that students walked away from that graph thinking about what's going on, because that's the world they're entering.
00:20:41
Speaker
I think you're right on the topics that are closer to their interests or that the findings in the graph are counterintuitive or not expected. Those are the sorts of things that people are going to, especially students are going to connect with and want to interact. Yeah. Well, it's a really
Student Participation and Accessibility
00:20:56
Speaker
interesting project. I look forward to watching it unfold. Now, can anyone engage with the project? If I just want to go on and start typing, can I go on or is it just for students and teachers who have registered with the Learning Network?
00:21:08
Speaker
It's really for, I mean, the conversation is really for students. We want a student conversation, so we ask that economists and statisticians not come on in our conversation for that. This is really intended, and our site's really intended for students and for teachers to use with students. But any student really can come on. They register at NewYorkTimes.com. It's free. The Learning Network and this site, and this feature is free, and it takes two seconds to register. And then once they're registered, they can participate in our online conversation. Like Sharon said,
00:21:38
Speaker
We also want these conversations to happen in the classroom, and that doesn't even involve registering at all. It just involves turning on your computer and looking at the screen.
00:21:46
Speaker
Right. Well, so I'm going to recommend everyone
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:21:48
Speaker
who listens to the show who has kids get their kids to register and get on and you can work with your kids to teach them some data visualization and get involved in the conversation because it sounds great. And then once this project has been going on long enough, you can start opening up to the rest of us because I'm sure the rest of us want to get in there and answer these important questions. Great. Yeah. Perhaps the times will do something like this for the general audience.
00:22:09
Speaker
Yeah. Sounds great. Um, Sharon, Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been really interesting and I look forward to following the project over the next few months. Thanks, John. Glad to be here. Thanks a lot, John. Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you'll be able to check out what's going on with this graph in the New York times and maybe even tell your kids, teachers in schools about the project and see if they would want to get involved in it. Um, so if you have questions or comments, please do let me know a shout out on the website or on Twitter.
00:22:36
Speaker
Until next time, this has been the PolicyBiz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.