Overview
Leticia Perez is a Data Science and Professional Learning Specialist in Science and Engineering at WestEd. She has over 19 years of experience planning and carrying out professional learning experiences across a variety of informal and formal learning environments. As Co-PI of the Boosting Data Science Teaching and Learning in STEM project and colead of development work for the Place-Based Learning to Advance Connections, Education, and Stewardship Project (NASA PLACES), she supports teachers in the integration of data fluency in middle and high school math and science classrooms. By applying a critical and humanizing pedagogical lens to her work, Perez seeks to center students’ identities and sense of place and being within data itself and broader educational experiences.
Perez’s current work at WestEd includes the creation of two new Making Sense of Science Courses that infuse data and place-based education in math and science classrooms. The Boosting Data Fluency course has completed a round of piloting and will be available to districts starting in 2025. Aligning with Perez’s goal for inclusive education, her current work includes working with government and industry partners to curate data assets for use in STEM classrooms and applying Universal Design to Data Science Adventures.
Perez began her career in education within the classroom as an integrated science and AP environmental science teacher for 9 years. During that time, she supported districtwide professional learning for LAUSD, local assessments, and course-level pacing plans. Her professional learning experience and data enthusiasm led to working on the UCLA Science Project. There she designed a wide variety of professional learning that ranged from the integration of argumentation into teacher created storylines to Mobilize, a grant that worked to create data science units that aligned with 9th grade math and science standards. Before joining WestEd, Perez served as the Curriculum Director for the UCLA STEM+C3 project that helped math and science educators integrate computational thinking and data science into their instruction. This work included the development of graduate computer science coursework sequences for secondary licensure in computer science.
Education
- BS in biology, California Lutheran University
Select Publications
Kim-John, L., Sandoval, W. A., Kawasaki, J., Kovach, J., Perez, L., & Clark, H. F. (2022). Deepening content knowledge and practice through research practice partnerships. In A. Francois & K. H. Quartz (Eds.), Preparing and sustaining social justice educators. Pp 105-125. Harvard Education Press.
Arnold, P., Perez, L., & Johnson, S. (2021). Using photographs as data sources to tell stories. Harvard Data Science Review, 3(4).
Perez, L. R., Spangler, D. A., & Franklin, C. (2021). Engaging young learners with data: highlights from GAISE II, Level A. Harvard Data Science Review, 3(2)..
Bargagliotti, A., Franklin, C., Arnold, P., Gould, R., Johnson, S., Perez, L., & Spangler, D. (2020). Pre-K–12 Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) Report II. American Statistical Association; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Sandoval, W. A., Kawasaki, J., Kovach, J., Perez, L., Kwako, A., Clark, H. F., Modrek, A., & Kim-John, L. (2019, April 5-9). Helping teachers conceptualize the radical re-organization of their practice [Paper presentation]. The 2019 American Education Research Association annual meeting, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Kovach, J., Perez, L., Kawasaki, J., Kim-John, L., & Sandoval, W. A. (2018, October). Creating storylines to support coherent three-dimensional learning [Short course presentation]. The annual meeting of the California Science Teachers Association. Los Angeles, CA, United States.
