What are the top ten causes of death and disability in a country? Answering this question requires getting familiar with some numbers. This week, the Incubator’s pedagogy team convened an internal “data lab” to explore the data that goes into these rankings. Incubator Pedagogy Fellow, Farah Qureshi, introduced the session with a primer about disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs). DALYs are a measure of disease burden, and provide a snapshot of the years lost to poor health, disability, or early death. The measure allows researchers, policymakers, and students to compare countries’ overall health and general health trends.
With this introduction in hand, the team pulled out laptops to play with GBD Compare, a data interactive from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation that allows users to dig deeper into DALYs across geography, time, cause, sex, and other factors. The Incubator’s Instructional Design Specialist, Nina Bhattacharya, walked the team through a series of data exercises that prompted observations (“I wonder why…”), questions (“How do you…”), and even delight (“I can’t believe that”). In between exercises, staff jotted down ideas to inform future curriculum development.
“We want students to walk away with the tools and confidence to make sense of data,” explained Bhattacharya. “And if we want students to develop these skills, we have to comfortable jumping in ourselves.”
Graphical literacy is both a cornerstone of Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s teaching philosophy and the curriculum that is developed at the Incubator. The session was a perfect opportunity for Incubator staff to brush up on their data skills and brainstorm ways to translate their insights to generating novel educational products.