The data strand — six lessons, one instrument
Built 2026-08-27. Student-facing material, not an inventory record.
The Academy owns three data-literacy decks and its record of every one of them ends the same way:
"Slides only, no prompt, no worksheet, no rubric." —
evaluating-map-data.md"The deck alone is half the lesson." —evaluating-data.md"Same gap as its sibling." —data-visualizations.md
This is the other half. Six lessons that run on decks and sources the Academy already has, filling blocks the Master sheet already reserves.
The ladder
The GIS stack holds the method constant and raises the abstraction of the subject. This strand does something different and complementary: it holds the subject ordinary and moves the student from reading a claim to making one.
| # | Lesson | The rung | The question | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Read the Chart | what it says | Does this chart support what it appears to say? | evaluating-data.pptx |
| 2 | What the Number Counts | what it counts | Is the thing measured the thing named? | three claims + construction |
| 3 | The Shape of the Picture | what it shows | Would a different chart change the answer? | data-visualizations.pptx |
| 4 | The Map Is a Chart | where it is | What does geography add to the ways a chart fails? | evaluating-map-data.pptx |
| 5 | Find Your Own | what you can get | Can you source a number you are willing to defend? | _planning/source-list.md |
| 6 | Make One That Lies | what you make it say | Can you mislead with only true numbers — and will you say so? | student-sourced data |
Read it → Question it → Draw it → Place it → Get it → Make it.
Protocol: _protocol/full-cycle-data.md — the non-spatial sibling of the map protocol, same five steps, deliberately the same shape so students hear the echo.
Where each lesson runs
Placement follows the corpus's own test, from _planning/the-progression.md: a lesson belongs in the year where the criteria it demands are the ones the student is being asked to develop.
| Year | Course | Block it fills | Lessons |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | ECS | before SF MAP | 1, and a reduced 4 |
| 10 | IS1 | MAPS1 (recorded not captured) | 2 + 4 |
| 10 | IS1 | DATA1 2/16 – 2/28, with Handoff Phase 1 | 3 |
| 11 | IS2 | MAPS2, the lead-in to Los Angeles | 5 + 4 |
| 11 | IS2 | RISK, paired with ETHICS and currently empty | 6 |
| 12 | IS3 | front of the capstone StoryMap | 6, on capstone data |
Four blocks that had no material now have some, and one — RISK — has its first.
Lesson 4 runs in every year, on purpose
_planning/the-gis-stack.md records that each rung of the GIS ladder is preceded by a MAPS lead-in block, and then asks whether ECS and IS3 have one too:
"If the pair structure holds across all four years, two more blocks exist that this inventory has not captured."
Proposed answer: the lead-in is the same lesson, run four times, aimed at a different rung each year. That needs no uncaptured blocks — only the deck the Academy already owns and a fresh map set for the later runs. Detail and the standing caveat in 04-the-map-is-a-chart.md.
What the strand is graded by
The Critical Analysis rubric. No second instrument — the rubric is the Academy's assessment spine and a data-specific rubric would fork it.
What each lesson makes reachable, which is the corpus's own non-arbitrary test of whether a lesson is worth its period:
| 1 Read | 2 Counts | 3 Shape | 4 Map | 5 Find | 6 Make | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CONCISE | yes | yes | ||||
| ACCESSIBLE | yes | |||||
| CONTRASTING | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | |
| STRUCTURED | yes | yes | yes | |||
| PROFOUND | available | available | ||||
| ORIGINAL | yes | yes | yes | |||
| SKEPTICAL | entry | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| WIDE ANGLE | yes | yes | yes |
The shape of that table is the ladder: entry criteria at rung 1, terminal criteria at rung 6, and PROFOUND only where the student is asked to say something about themselves — which is the criterion's actual dependency, per the progression.
The two sentences the strand exists to make land
From the New York investigation, year 10:
"This map shows where people complain about rats. Not necessarily where rats are."
Right now a student meets the most important idea in the Academy's data work for the first time inside an assignment, as a warning the teacher supplies. Lesson 2 teaches it as a subject, off the map, the week before. The student gets to recognise it instead of being told it.
From lesson 6, year 11 or 12:
"Most misleading charts are not lies. They are unexamined choices, made by someone who wanted their point to land."
That is the sentence that stops four years of data literacy from graduating cynics. Lesson 1's cap of two JUNK calls per period is the same idea enforced at entry level: being unable to tell a good chart from a bad one is the same failure as believing all of them.
What this closes
| Gap, as the corpus states it | How |
|---|---|
| Three decks, "slides only, no prompt, no worksheet, no rubric" | Lessons 1, 3, 4 are those prompts |
| DATA1 block, no material | Lesson 3, beside Handoff Phase 1 |
| MAPS1 block, not captured | Lessons 2 + 4 |
| RISK, paired with ETHICS, nothing built | Lesson 6 as an ethics case |
| "Nothing sends students to these sources to find their own data" | Lesson 5 |
| "No ninth-grade lesson asks a student to say what they think" | Lesson 1, run with the seminar table card |
| "Run one seminar in ECS — cost: zero" (progression item 5) | same |
| GIS stack: are there lead-ins for ECS and IS3? | Lesson 4, run at every rung — proposed, not recovered |
| INFOGRAPHIC block: the standard exists, the reason for it does not | Lesson 3's infographic hinge |
Open, across the strand
- Seven slides in
evaluating-data.pptxand all nine indata-visualizations.pptxhave no text layer. The run lists and the lever answer key need eyes on the decks. - Is
data-visualizations.pptxa subset of the larger deck? Unresolved in the inventory. If it is, lesson 3 needs its own charts and the decks should merge. - Lesson 4 running four times needs three additional map sets, or students will learn the deck instead of the failure.
- The twelve sources have not been triaged for what a fifteen-year-old can actually pull in one period.
- Check Classroom before treating any of the six as new. Six claimed gaps in this corpus have dissolved on a fuller dump — most recently rocketry, which turned out to have a Fire-Marshal-approved launch plan. If MAPS1 or DATA1 material exists, it wins and these become the second pass.
- The placements are recommendations. The lessons themselves are year-agnostic, which is why they are in
library/rather than under a course.