"I happen to be one of 47.8%": Social-Emotional and Data Reasoning in Middle School Students’ Comics about Friendship

Document Title

"I happen to be one of 47.8%": Social-Emotional and Data Reasoning in Middle School Students’ Comics about Friendship

Document Information

• Topic Area: Data literacy, social-emotional learning, integration of art teaching with technology
• Keywords: data literacy, social-emotional learning, data comics, mathematics education, art education, data reasoning, creative expression, middle school education, narrative construction, digital tools
• Conference: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22), April 29–May 5, 2022, New Orleans, USA

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues and Challenges: Current data literacy education often focuses on mathematical and statistical skills, neglecting the ethical significance of data, its social context, and the ability to connect with others emotionally. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is critical for adolescents to learn how to manage emotions, understand others’ feelings, and maintain effective communication.
• Importance: As society becomes increasingly data-driven, cultivating students’ ability to understand and reason about data from a humanistic perspective—connecting it to real-world problems and personal experiences—has profound implications for education and society.
• Research Motivation: To explore how artistic forms (e.g., comics) can integrate data reasoning with social-emotional learning, using narrative to help students understand how data interacts with social contexts.
• Related Work: Data comics, as a narrative form combining images, text, and data visualization, have been shown to improve data comprehension and engagement. However, their application in education, particularly for middle school students’ data literacy training, remains underexplored.

Solution

• Method Introduction: The authors proposed a six-week interdisciplinary curriculum unit for 7th-grade students at a school in an eastern U.S. city. The curriculum integrates art and mathematics teaching, enabling students to analyze data charts related to friendship and create data comics to express their perspectives.
• Innovations:
  1. Data relevance to students’ personal lives: Students’ attitudes and experiences regarding friendship were collected through questionnaires and used as the basis for learning.
  2. Integration of art and data reasoning: Using the Pixton digital comic tool, students freely created visual narratives to express their data reasoning results and emotional connections.
  3. Combining social-emotional learning and data reasoning: Students were guided to explore the social and personal dimensions of data.
• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:
  1. Curriculum Design: Researchers collaborated with teachers to design modules combining statistical reasoning with comic storytelling.
  2. Pixton Tool: Provided an accessible digital tool for remote use, supporting students in quickly creating personalized comics.
  3. Student Activities: Included data analysis (e.g., reading box plots, dot plots), constructing data contexts through storytelling, and expressing data reasoning through art and text.
  4. Comprehensive Evaluation: Researchers and teachers jointly developed assessment criteria to evaluate the validity and expressiveness of students’ works.

Research Findings

• Specific Outcomes:
  1. Data Reasoning: Students used statistical data to construct narratives, including describing, contextualizing data, reflecting individual experiences, and exploring potential impacts of data.
  2. Social-Emotional Learning: Students demonstrated SEL abilities such as self-awareness, social awareness, and interpersonal skills through their comics. Notably, students focused on explaining the complexities of friendship using data in their narratives.
  3. Visual Expression: Comics incorporated extensive non-verbal expressions, such as facial expressions and body language, to enhance the connection between data and emotions.
• Advantages Compared to Existing Approaches:
  • Provided a cross-disciplinary educational integration model combining art and mathematics;
  • Connected data reasoning closely to students’ real-life scenarios, enhancing learning motivation.
• Experiment and Evaluation Results:
  • Over 90% of comics showcased students’ deep reasoning about data;
  • SEL-related expressions, including self-awareness (90.9%), social awareness (66.7%), and interpersonal skills (69.7%), were widely reflected in students’ works;
  • The Pixton platform significantly improved students’ convenience and expressiveness in creation.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. The study used pre-processed data, limiting students’ opportunities to learn "data processing" skills (e.g., filtering, grouping).
  2. Lack of multiple rounds of comic iteration and discussion prevented students from thoroughly exploring the logical connections between data and emotional contexts.
  3. Narrowly defined data literacy skills (e.g., probabilistic reasoning, group comparisons) require more design support.
  4. Future research is recommended to explore how more diverse SEL and data reasoning skills can be integrated into STEM education programs.

In summary, this study expands the educational application of combining data and art while highlighting the potential for optimizing interdisciplinary educational models to develop students’ abilities further.