In science classrooms around the world, students encounter data that has already been interpreted and visualized by scientists, teachers, journalists, and more. But many science education activities focus on what students learn or memorize rather than how students can build skills to make sense of what they see in the data.

Arts-based education focuses on approaches that enable students to observe, understand, and make meaning from visual information. Educators from CIRES, the Nurture Nature Center, the Education Development Center, and J. Sickler Consulting harnessed these practices to develop a process that helps middle school science teachers integrate arts-based techniques into their classrooms. The approach supports students in developing critical thinking skills, building a deeper understanding of visual data, and making design choices for representing data.

“Observation and discussion techniques, in particular, make a lot of sense in science education,” said Hilary Peddicord, education lead for NOAA’s Science on a Sphere at the CIRES Center for Education, Engagement, and Evaluation. “Science is inherently a creative process of uncovering truth — and that requires slow, careful, and critical looking.”

Peddicord is a co-principal investigator (PI) for the National Science Foundation-funded Building Insights through Observation (BIO) project, which uses arts-based learning approaches to help students develop critical thinking skills for interpreting data maps. The BIO framework includes activities that weave together visual thinking, design thinking, and content understanding skills:

• Observation and discussion: Students use a Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) inspired approach – a facilitation method commonly used in art museums – to observe and discuss two related visuals: an artwork and a scientific data map.
• Bridging activity: Students make design choices to represent their unique, personal data and identify connections to patterns in their class dataset.
• Data sketches: Students reinterpret mapped data through their own representations, then compare and overlay their maps with those created by peers.

The BIO framework is not only a process of slow, personal discovery – it also reveals how others’ insights can inform your own understanding,” Peddicord said. “It reminds me of the nature of science and how scientists build knowledge together."

The BIO team partnered with 10 middle school science teachers from across the U.S. between 2022 and 2024 to examine how these practices support students’ data literacy and reasoning skills.  

“Being a part of this project has been very transformative for my teaching,” said Mark Goldner, a partner teacher from Roland Hayes School in Brookline, Massachusetts. “Now, whenever I put up any kind of visual data set, it comes right back to me — oh, let's use VTS with that.”

BIO didn’t just focus on student growth, it also fostered teacher learning and professional development. The BIO team hosted 3 in-person summer workshops in June 2022, June 2023, and June 2024, and multiple individual meetings throughout each school year to support the partner teachers as they adapted the framework for their unit of study and implemented it in their classrooms.

“It is going to be scary at first because it’s so ingrained in us to try to get students to the right answer,” said Dave Curry, a BIO teacher from Newtown Middle School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. “You’ll learn. They’ll learn. And you’ll both grow through the process of discovery.”

In a recent CEEE webinar, the BIO team debuted a teacher’s toolbox with lesson plans and resources to support and guide teachers interested in using the BIO framework in their classrooms.

Research led by co-PI Jessica Sickler found that the BIO framework helped students improve their skills of observation and interpretation of data and their ability to apply geographical knowledge.

“These skills are critical in today’s world, which is awash in so much data,” said Kathryn Semmens, science director at the Nurture Nature Center and PI of the BIO project. “Students need to be able to think critically about what they observe and make connections that facilitate meaning-making.”

Sickler also evaluated student feedback. The results showed that 60 percent of students most enjoyed creating the Data Sketches activity.  Across all the BIO activities, students indicated they liked making discoveries through their observations, exercising creativity through their design choices, and collaborating with and hearing from others.

“Students expressed that they liked the ownership and empowerment that the BIO activities gave them to make design choices and be creative,” Sickler said.

Teacher feedback also indicated BIO facilitated student growth. The majority of partner teachers felt the BIO framework engaged students who typically participate less in science class, helped students build flexible thinking skills, and prompted more investment in classroom work. The BIO framework can also be used with a variety of Earth and Environmental science topics, from weather and climate to plate tectonics and more.

“The BIO team is encouraged by the positive reception of this new approach by science teachers,” Semmens said. “We look forward to continuing to support teachers in its implementation and exploring other possibilities for its application.”