Bringing Social Studies to Life With Data

When I designed my grade six social studies course on human geography, I incorporated different disciplines into my units. I wanted data analysis to be seen as a social studies skill, not only as a math or science skill, so I set out to find data sets I could use with my students that were easy to consume and had lots of topics to pull from.

Data has become the centerpiece of my teaching. Students uncover topics of urbanization, climate change, demographics, and culture by analyzing data and making observations from it. To make this possible, I use four different resources to create lessons, quiz questions, projects, and data sets.

Country-Specific Data

I want my sixth-grade students to understand that data tells us a story, and how to use and understand social science data was my first lesson. I introduced them to the Population Reference Bureau World Data Sheet and how to read it. The Population Reference Bureau supported my entire demographics unit. Their resources offer a variety of lesson plans and discussion questions that are easy to use, and their World Data Sheet has information on every country from birthrate, projected population, and urban population to gross national income in one easy-to-read table. They even have a “Country Profile” graphic organizer to help students make sense of the data.

Students completed questions in groups from a region in the World Data Sheet. When I printed it, I scaled it so that just the key information was shown. Giving a printed copy versus a digital copy kept students focused instead of being distracted or overwhelmed by the size of the document.

After students showed me their completed questions, they chose a data column to display on a choropleth map. They had to create their own scale for the legend to show the data. Later on in this unit, students gathered information from the World Data Sheet to create their chosen country’s demographics policy.

Making Demographics Come Alive

Population Education has a variety of lessons and templates for all age levels from math to climate change to economics, including great graphic organizers. I wanted my students to learn about population pyramids and how decision-makers use them as a guide when they create policies, so I used Population Education’s lesson to guide our inquiry.

My first lesson used the data and templates from Population Education, and students learned about what the different shapes of pyramids meant. Working in country groups so they could help each other, students utilized the templates to make a population pyramid. They love math and zoomed through, doing the calculations on their own.

Later in the unit, when students completed a policy project on specific countries, I had them create their own population pyramids using data from PopulationPyramid.net and the templates from Population Education. I downloaded the data as an .exl file including only the numbers and uploaded it with view-only access so that students couldn’t see the pyramid structure visual. My students created demographic policies and used population pyramids to show the changes their policy would have on the population in 25 years.

Weekly Dose of Data

Data doesn’t have to be just for big projects and lessons, however. A colleague showed me the New York Times’ “What’s Going On in This Graph?” feature, which posts a graph weekly with some discussion questions and analysis. There are plenty of graphs, so you can pick out topics your students might be interested in. My colleague and I have used this as a do-now in class.

We post a shared Google Sheet for students to enter what they notice and wonder, and to create a headline for a story about their graph. This exposes them to some nontraditional graphs and lets us have some interesting conversations. Creating headlines allows students to think creatively and summarize the purpose of the data in a succinct and catchy way.

You could also use the graphs in discussions or assessments, or create whole lessons around them.

Data For Every Topic

I have saved the best for last. If you take one source away from this article, I hope it is this one. Our World in Data has everything a social studies teacher needs. This website has a variety of topics, and all their data is downloadable as either a visual or raw data. It is easy to select for the countries or years you want on their interactive graphs. Almost all of my units, from urbanization to sustainable cities to climate change to demographics, have something from here.

I mainly use the site for my own learning and gathering data and visuals for lessons. They publish articles that students could read or that could be used as part of a discussion or assignment. They do provide some lesson plans, but for a middle school classroom, you will likely need to modify them to make them age-appropriate.

I use their graphs and visuals in my slides, quizzes, and lessons, such as activities with individual questions or for stations/round-table discussions. The unlabeled maps help my students learn countries a bit faster, too. This site is the first place I look when I want data around a topic or when teaching about different types of graphs.

You could also use this website in a do-now activity like I do with “What’s Going On in This Graph.” Curiosity is the best way to hook the students in—find a unique graph and use it as an attention-getter at the start of your lesson. I hide an element of the map/graph and have students ask questions as they try to interpret it. These cartograms from WorldMapper would also get the conversation going in class!

Bringing hard social science data into the classroom is imperative for having students think critically about the world. Teaching them how to compare, question, analyze, and represent data is not just a math or science skill. Once students realize that data helps lawmakers, policy experts, and governments make decisions, they know they can also use it to start making their own decisions about the world.