This page shares assignments developed for use in the curriculum at Lewis & Clark College that aim to develop students' capacity to work critically with data. These assignments are licensed with creative commons as CC BY-NC-SA. Please contact Parvaneh Abbaspour with any questions.
Primary Source Analysis of a Dataset
This assignment asks students to perform a primary source analysis of a dataset much as they would with a historical document. It is readily adaptable to focus students' attention on any elements of the dataset's creation and can be nicely added alongside a more traditional computation/summary exercise (i.e. find the mean, median, mode, etc).
Link to sample primary source analysis assignment.
Data Diary Challenge
This assignment challenges students to record a day of their lives in numbers. In order to do so, they must define variables, specify and justify units of measure for each, and present their model in a data dictionary. Then they are tasked with collecting data for one or more days. Following the data set collection students are asked to reflect together on what they learned and tasked to think about what aspects of human experience data can and cannot capture. This assignment typically stretches over 2-3 weeks and has multiple instructional components. We are working to upload them here, but in the meantime, if you would like a copy, please reach out to Parvaneh by email.
Indexing (your) Happiness
This assignment is in development for the 2024-25 academic year. It is a take-off of the Data Diary Challenge assignment above, and it can either build on the Data Diary assignment or stand alone. It tasks students with locating a currently calculated index of happiness and then investigating the available documentation to determine how it is calculated. It then tasks students with thinking about their own lives and what moments or experiences or parameters are critical to their own happiness. They then must work to revise the methodology of the published index to reflect what they perceive to be the determinants of their own mood. This assignment aims to introduce students to the possibilities and limitations of indices. Materials available late this year.
Telling a Data Story
Each academic year the library invites students to submit data visualizations from their coursework to the website LC DataStories. This website aims to reinforce the idea that data visualizations are acts of communication. The challenge to students is to make a visualization that speaks coherently enough that the message can standalone outside of the contextual assignment. Students are asked to prepare an accompanying abstract that acknowledges the provenance of their dataset and otherwise articulates clearly their work.
Link to more information about the project.