Engaging students with data is a powerful tool for helping them learn both scientific content and principles and the processes of inquiry that are at the heart of science. Working with real-world data can place learning in a context that is exciting and relevant by providing connections to a students experience with their local environment, major global events (e.g. major earthquakes, global warming), or high profile scientific missions or experiments (e.g. data from space).

Educators use data-enhanced learning experiences to meet a wide variety of goals including:

• teaching quantitative skills, technical methods and scientific concepts
• preparing students to address real world complex problems
• developing students ability to use scientific methods
• teaching students to critically evaluate the robustness of data or evidence and their consequent interpretations or conclusions
• increasing verbal, written and graphical communication skills
• providing training in the values and ethics of working with data

Depending on the specific learning goals and outcomes that are desired, a wide variety of approaches can be very successful in engaging students with data. Student experiences with "real" data fall into at least two broad categories:

• Activities in which students collect and interpret their own data, often in the context of a larger data-set that has been developed by the scientific community over time.
• Activities that engage students in using existing data sets to answer questions, often their own, new questions.
  While these techniques can be successfully used with no technological support, modern information technology and data-dissemination provide exciting new opportunities in both areas. This presentation will look at the range of approaches that can be taken to using data in the classroom in the context of learning goals, and the role that DLESE can play in enhancing and supporting these activities.