by Ashley Lewis Presser
This gallery walk poster describes and demonstrates the Preschool Data Toolbox, created through an iterative, design-based research approach. This teacher-facing digital app is intended for teachers to use with preschoolers on touch-screen tablets to support the collaboration of preschool teachers and children as they collecting data, creating simple graphs, and using the graphs to answer real-world questions. The intervention consisted of nine curricular investigations and an integrated digital app that scaffolded the preschool DCA process and offered an applied problem-solving context for using mathematical knowledge (i.e., counting, sorting, classifying, comparing, and contrasting). The investigations integrate hands-on and play-based and involved identifying research questions, collecting data, creating simple representations (i.e. graphs and tally charts), and discussing and interpreting the graphs to answer questions. The Preschool Data Toolbox app scaffolded this process by supporting teachers as they moved through specific data collection steps (i.e. collecting, representing, and interpreting data).
