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9.8.25

Join Data Nuggets at NABT 2025!

We are looking forward to sharing Data Nuggets at the 2025 NABT Professional Development Conference. NABT will be held from October 30th through November 2nd at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Details are below!

Title: Authentic scientific research and data for the classroom with Data Nuggets
Description: Data Nuggets are free resources, co-designed by scientists and teachers to bring authentic data and research into classrooms. They highlight the true process of science, along with any surprises along the way. In this hands-on Huxley Award session we will demonstrate best practices for their use in biology classrooms.
Presenter: Dr. Elizabeth Schultheis
Date & Time: Thursday, October 30, 2025 at 12:30 PM–2:30 PM
Location: Midway Suite 7 & 8

Hands-on Data Nuggets workshop to learn about the program and go through classroom-ready example activities!

9.5.25

Salmonberries in our future – draft for piloting

Picking salmonberries is a cultural tradition for many Alaskans.

Thank you for piloting our latest activity! Download and complete the student activity below.

The activities are as follows:

8.27.25

Can kelp help the plovers?

The activities are as follows:

It’s a beach day! You’re walking through the sand on a southern California beach, looking for a place to put your things. You notice there are clumps of dried-up seaweed everywhere. As you brush aside some of these clumps to lay out your towel, a shrimp-like bug jumps out at you and bounces off your hand! With smelly dried seaweed, small birds skittering across the sand, and hopping bugs, you wonder, is this beach healthy? Yes! These are all parts of a thriving food web.

Beaches are home to many important species that each play a role in the ecosystem. On the Pacific Coast of California, the dried-up seaweed is typically made up of several species of kelp. Kelp captures the sun’s energy through photosynthesis. Beach hoppers, the little jumping “bugs”, are actually small crustaceans
that feed on the kelp. In turn, these beach hoppers are the main food source for birds.

Snowy plovers are a type of bird that loves to eat beach hoppers. This shorebird species is threatened in California due to habitat loss. The sandy beaches where the plovers live and nest are also places where people like to walk and play. Scientists want to better understand what makes up the base of the food web that supports plovers to help their populations recover.

High school seniors, Mari and Azra, visited beaches in Lompoc, a coastal city in California, many times with their science classes. They wanted to learn more about the sandy beach ecosystem, so they read an article from a local research group at the University of California-Santa Barbara. On one of their field trips, they learned about a scientist named Jenny Dugan. Jenny and members of her lab study the beach hoppers’ important role in the sandy beach ecosystem. The Dugan lab had done a series of experiments to see what types of kelp beach hoppers liked to eat.

Azra (left) and Mari (right) working with kelp.

Mari and Azra wanted to set up a similar experiment to see if the beach hoppers in the Lompoc area preferred the same species of kelp. Their teacher, Ms. Moore, collected beach hoppers, sand, and kelp on her way to school one day. Mari and Azra set up ten plastic containers by measuring an equal amount of damp sand and punching holes in the lids. Then they tried to put 10 beach hoppers into the container. But it was hard to know the exact number until the very end of the experiment because some would hop out before the lid was on! At the end of the study, the number ranged from 8-15 beach hoppers in each container. Finally, Mari and Azra weighed out 15.0 grams of kelp and put it on top of the sand in the containers. They put one type of kelp in each container. Four containers had feather boa kelp, Egregia, four containers had giant kelp, Macrocystis, and two containers had Laminaria, another type of kelp. Mari and Azra also set up controls for each type of kelp with sand and kelp, but no beach hoppers. This container would tell them how much kelp weight was lost to water evaporation over the 3 days of the experiment, and not due to being eaten.

Trial 1: Mari and Azra placed the containers outside in a shady spot for three days. On the third morning, they opened up the containers to weigh the kelp that remained. Before weighing the kelp, they rinsed it to remove excess sand and dried it gently to remove excess water. Finally, they counted the beach hoppers that were in the container.

Trial 2: After reviewing their results from this experiment, Mari and Azra realized the beach hoppers did not like Laminaria at all. They decided to repeat the experiment using kelp and beach hoppers from a different beach, and did not include Laminaria as a food source.

Featured scientists: Mari and Azra from Lompoc High School, California. Jenny Dugan from the University of California-Santa Barbara. Written by: Melissa Moore from Lompoc High School.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.1

8.20.25

Anole’s new niche

Yoel looking for lizards on a spoil island.
Photo Credit: Adam Algar

The activities are as follows:

Throughout our history, humans have been moving species around the world. In your own backyard there are likely multiple species that have come from different countries and mixed into your local ecosystem. Human movement of species has sped up in the last 150 years as we have gotten better at traveling by trains, planes, boats, and cars.

An open question is, what happens to species when they are moved around? Scientists can study both the species that have been moved, called introduced species, and the original species that were there before, called native species.

One interesting system to study is the anole lizard populations in Florida. In this case, there is both an introduced species that arrived relatively recently, the brown anole, and a species that has been there for much longer, the green anole.

The story of these two anoles and their interactions begins millions of years ago when both the green anole and the brown anole evolved in Cuba. They had different niches, or areas of specialization in their ecosystem when they lived there together. The green anole mostly perched high up on tree trunks, moving through branches and leaves as it looked for insects to eat. The brown anole preferred to perch lower down, finding its food on the ground and the lower part of tree trunks.

The Green Anole (*Anolis carolinensis*) and the Brown Anole (*Anolis sagrei*). Photo Credit: Adam Algar

Then, 2-4 million years ago, the green anole established a new population in Florida. How it did this, we are not sure. But it probably was blown by hurricanes from Cuba to Florida on rafts of trees and other vegetation. Once in Florida, it spread throughout the southeastern United States. As best we can tell, the green anole changed its niche once it was in the United States without the brown anole around. Data from previous research suggest that it started finding insect prey on the ground and perched lower down in the tree trunks.

Then, in the 1950s, the brown anole came to southern Florida through human movement on boats. This probably happened because humans were moving agricultural products (like sugar cane) from Cuba to the United States.

Yoel is a scientist studying anoles, and he wanted to know how green anoles respond to the recent presence of the brown anole. Now that they are together in Florida, the two anole species interact a lot.

Looking south at Spoil Islands along the Intracoastal Waterway shipping channel in Mosquito Lagoon. Photo credit: Todd Campbell

They both have a large population, they eat similar insects, and likely compete for food and space. Yoel thought the green anoles might respond by changing their behavior and habitat use. Yoel predicted that the green anoles would return to the treetops once the brown anole arrived, living like their ancestors did with the brown anole in Cuba. He also thought that the brown anole would keep low on the tree trunks, because that is where it has always perched while it coexisted with the green anoles in Cuba.

To test his hypothesis, Yoel’s team worked on eleven islands that were approximately the size of football-fields in Mosquito Lagoon, Florida. All eleven islands had green anole populations on them. Six of the eleven islands also had brown anole populations present on them. This meant that five islands only had one species, the green anole.

This created an ideal “natural experiment” to collect data on how green anoles use the habitat when they are alone, compared with when they are living on islands with the brown anole. To do this, Yoel collected data on perch height. He and his team did this by walking through the island habitats slowly until they spotted a lizard. Then, they measured the height of the spot where the lizards were sitting in the trees.

Featured scientists: Featured scientist: Yoel Stuart (he/him) from Loyola University Chicago

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.0

7.5.25

Catching fish with sound

Mei next to the research vessel, Endeavor

The activities are as follows:

In our ocean, the connections between the environment and marine organisms are intricate and complex. The watery surroundings connect each level of the food web – including marine mammals, large fish, schooling fish, phytoplankton, and more. Climate change is causing our ocean to become warmer, and organisms are already starting to respond. When ocean waters change, the effects cascade through different levels of the food web. In order to understand how marine organisms, and their interactions, are affected by changing climate, we need accurate measurements that tell us what populations are like today and continue monitoring into the future.
As a biological oceanographer, Mei’s research focuses on organisms in the middle of marine food webs. These are the small schooling fish, like anchovies and herring, that consume other organisms, but are also vulnerable to predation. Growing up in Japan, the ocean was always a part of Mei’s life through hobbies such as swimming, fishing, and also from knowing the cultural importance of eating seafood and learning to prepare for tsunamis. She was first introduced to ocean science through a local fisher who had an oyster farm near her hometown. Since then, she has pursued her career as an oceanographer across three different countries – Japan, Canada, and the United States – both in academia and industry.

Mei now does research as part of a Long-Term Ecological Research project out of Massachusetts. This means that Mei is part of a scientist team working together to study long-term patterns in the ocean.
Looking at data over time allows Mei and others to better identify and understand the consequences of climate change. This information Mei next to the research vessel, Endeavor will help fishers and fisheries managers make decisions and prepare for the future.

Mei testing equipment before a research cruise

In August 2023, Mei went to sea on one of the project’s research cruises. She wanted to take a closer look at one of the fastest-warming ocean areas and richest fisheries in the world – the continental shelf of the Northeast U.S. She boarded a large research ship for 6 days with a team of 14 other scientists who specialize in different areas of oceanographic research. To more accurately collect these data, Mei used sound! Echosounders bounce sound off marine organisms, such as fish. This tool is similar to fish finders that are used by most fishing boats. However, the technology used by Mei is more sensitive and provides more detailed data.
The amount of sound that comes back to the ship after bouncing off fish or anything in the water is called volume backscattering strength, and is measured in decibels (dB). The intensity of what comes back can serve as a measure of fish abundance. If there are more fish, the number becomes larger (less negative).
While the echosounder is operating, other members of the research team measure water temperature and other parameters from the surface to near the bottom. Temperature is measured in degrees Celsius (ºC), and depth is recorded in meters (m). Mei wanted to use these data to give her a snapshot in time of where fish are located.

Featured scientist: Mei Sato (she/her) from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and
Northeast U.S. Shelf LTER (NES-LTER)

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.8

7.5.25

Bear Necessities: A genetic panel for bear identification

The activities are as follows:

North Carolina is home to many black bears. As human development expands into bear habitats, conflicts between people and bears are becoming more common. In these situations, identifying individual bears and understanding their origins is essential. This ensures that wildlife officials can correctly manage aggressive or relocated bears. It also allows for better tracking of bear populations and their movements across the state, helping to inform long-term conservation approaches.

Though each individual bear has its own genotype, or unique genetic makeup, individuals within the same population often share more DNA with each other than with members of other populations. A group of scientists started comparing the DNA of black bears in California and identified 11 unique regions, called loci, in the DNA of bears from different populations. This set of loci that the scientists can use to assign individual black bears to different populations is called Ursaplex.

Each loci have microsatellites, which are repetitive sequences of nucleotide bases that vary between individuals or populations. Different versions of the microsatellite loci are called alleles. By examining these patterns in a bear’s genotype, scientists can identify bears at an individual level and tell which population they are from.

Isabella is a wildlife geneticist who studies how we can use genetic tools to conserve wild animal populations. She has always been passionate about animals and conservation. Isabella, along with other scientists, wants to test whether or not the Ursaplex panel could work for black bears in North Carolina.

North Carolina bears are split into three different management groups based on where they are found: Mountain, Piedmont, and Coastal. Isabella wanted to know whether black bears show genetic differences based on which management group they live in. If so, she wanted to see if any of the microsatellites in the Ursaplex panel could be used to identify which management group a bear is from.

Isabella obtained blood or saliva samplesfor350black bears from collaborators at the Wildlife Resource Commission, the state agency for wildlife management. The samples came from bears in the Mountain and Coastal management groups. The Piedmont bear population is significantly smaller and elusive, so samples from Piedmont bears were not available. She extracted the DNA from the samples and found the genetic sequence at each of the 11 loci in Ursaplex. Isabella looked at then umber of nucleotide base repeats in each bear’s genetic sequence and used the data to identify any patterns based on where the bear was from. Each of the 11 loci included arebi-allelic, meaning each bear will have two copies of the locus (one from their mom and one from their dad). Recently, Isabella received a blood sample from a new baby bear, Murray, who was rescued by wildlife managers. This baby bear was alone when he was found, so we don’t know where in the state he came from. He was found in the Eastern part of the state, so Isabella thought that his parents were likely both Coastal management group bears.

Featured scientists: Isabella Livingston (she/her) from North Carolina State University Written with Kate Price

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.6

6.13.25

What grows when the forest goes?

Area of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, a few years after a fire.

The activities are as follows:

The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, or Andrews for short, is a long-term ecological research site in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. The forest is a temperate old-growth rainforest. It is known for its lush and green understory of flowering plants, ferns, mosses and a towering canopy of Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Red cedar, and other trees. Scientists have spent decades studying how plants, animals, land use, and climate are all connected in this ecosystem.

Matt is a biology teacher who has spent two summers in the field working with scientists at the Andrews. These experiences have been valuable ways to bring real data and research back to his students! When he visits, Matt works closely with Joe and Cole. Joe is a scientist who has spent many years working in the forest studying the impact of disturbances on plants. Cole is in Joe’s lab and has been focusing on fire’s effects on the forest during graduate school.

Historically, large, severe fires have been a part of the ecology of forests in Oregon. They typically occur every 200-500 years. Many of the plants at the Andrews Forest are those that can deal with fire. Fires clear out dead plants, return nutrients to the soil, and promote new growth of understory and canopy plants. With climate change impacting temperature and rainfall across the globe, forests in Oregon are increasingly experiencing longer periods of dry and hot weather. These changes are causing an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires.

On Matt’s last day at the Andrews in 2023, a lightning strike started a wildfire in a far corner of the forest. With hundreds of firefighters on the ground and several helicopters in the air, the “Lookout Fire” burned for several months, consuming about 70% of the Andrews forest!

Plots in 2023 being surveyed for native and invasive plants to calculate the proportion that are invasive after a burn.

When Matt returned in the summer of 2024, it looked nothing like the forest he had left. The fire completely changed the course of his research experience. When he saw the scorched forest, he began to wonder how it would recover. He also observed that the fire had not burned at the same intensity throughout the forest. Some areas of Andrews were burned more, and in some spots, the fire had been less intense.

Matt thought that some plants may do better after a severe burn, while other species might do worse. Specifically, Matt wanted to see whether native and invasive plants would show differences after a fire. Plants that have historically grown in an area without human interference are called native plants. These plants have a long history of adapting to the specific conditions in an area. When a plant species is moved by humans to a new area and grows outside of its natural range, it is called an invasive plant. Invasives often grow large and fast, taking over habitats, and pushing out native species. Invasive plants tend to be the ones that can grow fast and handle disturbances, so the team expected that invasive species would recover more quickly than native plants after high severity fires.

It was still too early to re-enter the areas burned by the Lookout Fire, so Matt and Joe chose another recent fire. They used data collected from a section of the forest that had burned in 2020. In 2021, a year after the fire, scientists put out 80 plots that were 1m²in size to collect data on the understory plants.

Each section was given a burn severity value based on the amount the canopy trees had burned directly over the plot. Scientists would look up at the tree canopy and see how much was missing, and the more that was gone, they knew the burn severity had been higher. Scientists then identified every species of plant in the plots and counted the number of individual plants of each species. This was repeated every year after 2021 to observe changes over time. Matt and Joe decided to analyze data from 2023, which Matt helped collect with Cole. To answer their question, they calculated the proportion of invasive plants in each plot.

Featured scientists: Joe LaManna (he/him) and Cole Doolittle (he/him) from Marquette University and
Matt Retterath (he/him) from Fridley Public Schools.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.9

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget:

There are two blog posts written about the Andrews LTER research featured in this activity.

https://lternet.edu/stories/fire-brings-new-perspectives-on-disturbance-at-h-j-andrews-experimental-forest/
https://lternet.edu/stories/burned-forest-bleached-reef-lter-sites-adapt-to-learn-from-disturbance/

6.9.25

NSF Terminates $1.5M Data Nuggets Grant

On Friday, May 9th, the National Science Foundation (NSF) terminated a collaborative research grant shared between Michigan State University and Auburn University, “Sharing Scientist Role Model Stories to Improve Equity and Success in Undergraduate STEM Education”, which had over $1M in unused funds remaining. We join over 1,600 grants abruptly terminated by NSF in recent months, affecting vital research, education, and open science efforts nationally.

NSF has been a critical partner in fueling the Data Nuggets team’s innovations and growth at Michigan State University. In fact, NSF funded the collaboration between scientists and K-12 teachers that sparked the development of Data Nuggets in 2010. Data Nuggets provide over 140 free data literacy activities that reach tens of thousands of educators and countless students per year. Without NSF’s historic investments and continued support, our wildly popular and effective data literacy program would not exist.

By terminating our collaborative grant, financial support and personnel needed to run this program no longer exist. We are committed to maintaining the existing collection of publicly available Data Nugget resources and continue to provide them for free. However, we will need to revise our operational model in order to develop and disseminate new activities. Additionally, we will no longer be able to conduct and disseminate foundational educational research to increase our understanding of the best teaching practices for using activities featuring scientists within classroom materials.

The sudden termination of our work is not only devastating for the programmatic and research team – it also wastes years of previous NSF-supported work and jeopardizes a future we envision filled with free, interactive learning resources to benefit millions of students and educators. In addition, the termination has directly prevented the hiring of 5 early career scientists as well as over 10 undergraduates who would have been trained in science communication, curriculum development, and discipline-based education research.

Our terminated grant, “Sharing Scientist Role Model Stories to Improve Equity and Success in Undergraduate STEM Education”, centered on further refining Data Nuggets to help more students see themselves in STEM careers. Past research by our team showed that sharing scientist stories within data literacy instruction was an effective way to engage students with the activities and help them relate to scientists. The goal of our terminated research was two-fold: first, to research and provide insight into how to effectively tell scientist role model success stories in instructional materials; second, to create a new set of freely available, evidence-based, educational resources for undergraduate biology classrooms.

The text of our termination letter mirrors many that we have seen, stating that they are “issuing this termination to protect the interests of the government … on the basis that [the grant] no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. This is the final agency decision and not subject to appeal.” Because appealing a grant termination is one way for an institution to raise its voice to object to an unwarranted action, our team submitted an appeal through Michigan State University; Auburn University declined to submit our appeal.

We remain steadfast in our mission to support free educational resources and interactive learning worldwide, to spark interest in data literacy for all students, and to share the stories of researchers who represent the full spectrum of identities within the science community.

More than ever, please consider supporting our work by sharing how important NSF funding has been to developing and advancing resources for STEM education. As the proposed US tax and spending bill goes to the Senate, we encourage those who can to contact your representatives and urge them to support funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other science agencies. Now is the time to act: the current funding proposal would slash NSF funding dramatically. #SaveNSF

Together, we can keep the future of interactive learning open and growing.

Sincerely,

The Data Nuggets Team and Auburn University collaborators

5.30.25

CO2 and trees, too much of a good thing?

The activities are as follows:

Kristina conducting the tree survey, measuring the size of a tree, which will later be used to calculate the mass of carbon in that tree.

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has steadily increased since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. This extra CO2 traps heat like a blanket, causing the global climate to warm. The resulting climate change effect is known and widely accepted in science. While scientists are certain that climate change is happening, they still have many questions about its impacts.

For example, scientists today are exploring whether climate change will help or hurt trees and forests. Many scientists think that elevated CO2 in the atmosphere can actually help trees. We can see why in the formula for photosynthesis:

6𝐶𝑂₂+6𝐻₂𝑂+𝐸𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦→𝐶₆𝐻₁₂𝑂₆ +6𝑂₂

Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy (sunlight) → Glucose + Oxygen

If you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, trees will have more resources for photosynthesis and can make more glucose. Glucose is food for the trees. Trees can use their glucose for growth, using it to make wood. However, trees sometimes have to put glucose towards other things. Just like us, plants break down glucose for energy through cellular respiration:

C₆𝐻₁₂𝑂₆ +6₂→ 6𝐶𝑂₂+6𝐻₂𝑂+𝐸𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦
Glucose + Oxygen → Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy (ATP)

Two large trees stand in the experimental plot after a survey. The tree to the right has been banded to measure its growth.

Trees need energy for everyday functioning, or to respond to stress. Under climate change, trees might experience more stress. Stress for trees might increase if summer temperatures get too hot, or they don’t have enough water. More stress means more respiration and less growth. Or, even worse, the trees could die. Dead trees can’t photosynthesize, and they also decompose, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere
as microbes break down wood and other materials.

Kristina and Luca are scientists looking at the effects of climate change on trees. They wanted to test whether climate change was benefitting or hurting trees. They set out to find some data that would allow them to test these alternative hypotheses.

A dead ash tree stands in the experimental plot after a survey. The carbon in this tree
will return to the atmosphere through decomposition.

Kristina runs a tree census in a forest at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Center in Virginia. Since 2008, she and many other scientists have surveyed every tree in their 26-hectare plot. Every five years, they count up how many trees are alive, how much they’ve grown, and how many have died. Luca joined Kristina’s lab in 2022. He and Kristina worked together with many other scientists to collect and process data on tree growth and mortality in 2023.

They used this growth and mortality data for individual trees to calculate levels of carbon gained and lost by the whole forest. The amount of carbon used for growth across the whole forest was measured as the mass of carbon gained. They also calculated the weight of the trees that died, which was measured as the mass of carbon lost. Both of these measurements were calculated in megagrams (Mg, that’s one million grams) of carbon (C) per hectare (ha) of forest per year (yr), or (MgC/ha/yr). The difference between these
two values is the change in carbon. This value gives the balance between carbon gained and lost. A positive value means there is more carbon being taken in by the forest than lost, and a negative value means that more carbon is being lost back to the atmosphere.

Featured scientists: Kristina J. Anderson-Teixeira (she/her) & Luca Morreale (he/him) at Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. Written by Ryan Helcoski

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 7.8

5.19.25

Science Communication and Data Literacy: Reflections on My Fellowship with Data Nuggets

Samson Stynen is a first PhD student in the Haddad Lab at W.K. Kellogg Biological Station. He studies the impacts of climate change on butterfly morphology and demography. He aspires to be a link between educators and scientists. He was awarded a KBS Outreach Fellowship to join the Data Nuggets program and gain experience in science outreach and communication.

As a first-year graduate student moving from Reno, Nevada, I had some hesitation about whether I’d find connections in Michigan or at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS). I never expected that one of my strongest connections would be with an outreach program I had experienced as a student and teacher: Data Nuggets.

Data Nuggets are lessons designed by scientists to engage K–16 students in data literacy using real scientific data. Coming from an education background, I encountered Data Nuggets during high school as a student, and then again when I was looking for lessons for my own students as a teacher. I had no idea they were connected to KBS!

In my first semester, I met Liz and Melissa, the creators and directors of Data Nuggets, and began helping occasionally with projects. Then, this past spring, I was fortunate to receive the Data Nuggets Fellowship, where I got to dive deeper into the program, from science communication to program management, and see all the behind-the-scenes work that keeps Data Nuggets running.

Highlights from the fellowship

One of the most exciting parts of the fellowship was presenting at the Michigan Science Teachers Association Conference in March. During our session, I spoke with about 25 educators about using Data Nuggets in their classrooms. In the second half of the session, I walked the audience through Little Butterflies on the Prairie, a new Data Nugget based on my lab’s research that had just launched in January. It was amazing to hear directly from teachers about their classroom experiences, how they planned to adapt these lessons for their students, and what resources they’d like to see next.

Sam presenting Data Nuggets to a room of teachers at MSTA 2025. Photo by E. Schultheis.

I also revived the monthly Data Nuggets newsletter where I highlighted new activities, teacher resources, and the upcoming outreach events. For the February newsletter, I interviewed and wrote a blog post highlighting KBS Post doc Dr. Rosemary Martin to share with teachers how science doesn’t stop in the winter.

Finally, I was able to help with Data Nugget’s recent effort in highlighting the scientists behind the science. A handful of lessons now include scientist profiles, allowing students to learn not just about the research, but about the people and stories behind it.

Why Data Nuggets is important

The need for data literacy is quickly rising. However, many classrooms today do not incorporate real data in their lessons. Real data is messy! Data Nuggets are a perfect solution! They get students thinking about the current problems around them, as we have DNs written by people all over the U.S. and world! They get students engaged in real scientific research and the scientists’ creative solutions, and they also get students practicing with authentic data, complete with those dreaded decimals!

Why outreach matters

As first year grad student, this fellowship reminded me that research doesn’t end when a paper is published. The next step is sharing that knowledge in ways that matter, like with the next generation of scientists.

It has been my goal after graduate school to be a bridge between researchers and educators. Whether that be with an open-source program for teachers or by returning to the classroom myself, I hope to continue to share Data Nuggets resources.

I am thrilled to be able to work with Data Nuggets and I look forward to the continued connection in many semesters, and years, to follow.