Looking for something new to enhance your children’s at-home learning experience? Consider introducing them to good research data management concepts. Don’t laugh — it’s never too early to teach kids research data management techniques so they’re better prepared for high school and college.
While research data management sounds like a dry subject, you can make it fun, and you’ll be preparing kids for more academic rigor down the road. Whether your children are eyeing STEM careers or you just want them to succeed in their required science classes, these skills will serve them well.
Research Data Management concepts for kids
No matter what is being researched, it’s bound to involve collecting data. From testing cancer drugs to tracking bird populations to determining which breakfast cereal is the most popular, data is being collected, compiled, and analyzed. Research data management means ensuring that the data is collected properly, recorded correctly, and stored securely.
If your children are still in grade school, they’re probably not ready for their own little lab notebooks and serious data crunching. But you can still introduce them to some key concepts that will serve them well not just in their STEM classes, but probably in all classes, as you’ll be encouraging attention to detail.
1. Use the same method to collect all data. Let’s say you decide to run a fun experiment to discover the average weight of strawberries. You purchase several pints of strawberries, and your children will weigh them and record the weight of each strawberry. At this point, you can stress the importance of using the same method to weigh each strawberry. If you use your digital kitchen scale for some, the bathroom scale for others, and a decorative mechanical scale for others, you will get various degrees of accuracy.
2. Record all data in the same format. Continuing with the strawberry example, in order to get the best results, you’ll want to teach your kids to record all of the data in the same format. That means choosing a unit of measure. If you have some weights listed in grams, and some in milligrams, and some in imperial measurements, you’ll have a very confusing data set.
3. Always get a complete data set. Assuming your kids have enjoyed learning how to find the average weight of strawberries, you can now move on to a more complicated and fun experiment. Consider, for example, a survey to determine everyone’s favorite fruit. They could poll friends and family and collect a variety of data points such as: favorite fruit, age, and gender. This could allow them to determine (based on your admittedly small data set) whether boys and girls have different fruit preferences, or whether adults like different fruit than kids do. In order to have a complete data set, they’ll need to collect that information from each participant, and record it.
Learning to manage research data can be fun
Research data management may not seem like the most fun concept, or even something that grade schoolers need to think about, but as you can see from these examples, you can make a game out of it.
With the strawberries for example, you not only get to learn the scientific concepts of measuring and recording data, but you also have delicious test subjects to eat. Collecting data on peoples’ favorite fruit gives the children something to discuss with friends and family on Zoom calls.
We hope that these tips help you teach your kids about research data management and keep them entertained and occupied.
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