“Your truth isn’t the Truth”: Data activities and informal inferential reasoning

This paper investigates data activities in an afterschool setting, offering a deeper understanding of the social nature of students’ informal inferences by investigating how informal inferences are negotiated in group interactions, influenced by social norms, and how statistical concepts come into play in learners’ informal inferential reasoning (IIR). Analyses take up a multi-sited orientation to investigate how youth used quantitative and contextual resources during a research activity to make meaning of data and negotiate emergent social tensions. Findings show how data activities that are part of informal inferential reasoning, such as collection, interpretation, generalization, inference, and representation unfolded as social, political, and personal. Implications call for designs for learning that better support working with data and understanding real-world phenomena and sociopolitical issues in ways that leverage youths’ experiences, enabling them to take part in social action as critical community actors. •We illustrate the consequential nature of youths’ negotiations of ‘truths’ about particular social phenomena (here, gender identity and bathroom restriction laws).•A multi-sited orientation illuminates how statistical concepts such as frequency counts and quantitative reasoning emerged as co-constructed aspects of meaning-making.•Analysis traces how youth used data activities to bridge their truths-under-negotiation with broader sociopolitical understandings of transgender people’s experiences.•We show data activities, as part of informal inferential reasoning, such as collection, interpretation, and representation unfolded as social, political, and personal.•Implications focus on informal inferential reasoning as a crucial aspect of citizenship to be leveraged across and outside of disciplinary boundaries in designs for learning.