Vassar students get personal with health and social data
Vassar CollegeChallenge
Dr. Catherine Tan, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College, needed an interactive data platform to demonstrate the relationship between social and economic factors and health to her students. Previously in her courses, Dr. Tan relied on tools that were either not interactive enough or too limited in scope for students to grasp the magnitude of how issues like income inequality, segregation, and housing impact community health.
It's the best tool to allow students to get personal with the data
Dr. Catherine Tan
Impact
Dr. Tan uses the City Health Dashboard in her undergraduate Health Inequalities & Activism course, an interdisciplinary class taken by sociology majors, science & technology studies majors, and pre-med students. She finds the tool particularly useful in highlighting the link between socioeconomic status and health for students in an engaging and interactive way.
The Dashboard served as an in-class interactive complement to reading assignments focused on the social determinants of health and was found to be particularly comprehensive because it allowed students to view multiple measures at once. In groups, students examined income inequality in a city of their choice, with most students focusing on their hometowns and places they know well. Then using the Compare Metrics feature, they selected various health outcome metrics and observed any geographic patterns that emerged. During this time, students supported what they saw in the Dashboard data and maps with their local knowledge of that particular city and guided their peers through their understanding of local landmarks, social dynamics, and segregation history. The Dashboard also supported class discussions on the root causes of health disparities.
As Dr. Tan described, “one of the Dashboard’s strengths lies in the fact that it doesn’t spell out what the challenges or issues might be in a city, rather it provides an opportunity for students to develop critical thinking. They are the ones responsible for identifying trends in the data, asking questions and making hypotheses about why those trends exist.”
