Data Diaries: Helping Undergraduate Students Reckon with Defining and Collecting Data One Golden Hour at a Time

Once collected, a spreadsheet of quantitative data appears deceptively objective, making the process of quantifying the phenomena of our world seem very matter-of-fact. In order to teach undergraduate students to think critically about the innate assumptions and subjectivity inherent in collecting data, we developed an assignment that challenges students to quantify a day of their lives. In this assignment, the Data Diary Challenge, over a span of two weeks students must enumerate a list of variables by which they can quantity a day of their life, define and justify a unit of measurement for each, refine their list of variables to a limited suite that might be used to “model” their day, construct a data dictionary that provides the information necessary for another person to replicate their model, and ultimately test their model by collecting three days of data for their lives. This presentation will share some outcomes of introducing this assignment into classes over the past three years.