Over 75 New York Times Graphs for Students to Analyze

What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
What’s going on this graph?

These three simple, open-ended questions are at the heart of “What’s Going On in This Graph?” — a weekly activity we’ve been running in collaboration with the American Statistical Association (A.S.A.) for the past six years. This feature invites students to analyze and interpret graphs previously published in The New York Times, first by noticing and wondering, then by creating a catchy headline to capture a graph’s main idea, and finally by considering what impact this data might have on them and their communities.

Classrooms around the country, and around the world, participate regularly — either by joining our public forum where students post comments and interact with our teacher moderators, or by having a discussion in their own classroom. They analyze graphs about sports figures like LeBron James, environmental trends like rising temperatures, economic activity like price inflation, and political realities like the ages of world leaders.

If you’re new to the feature, here is how it works:

• Most weeks during the school year, from September to May, we take a graph that has been published in The New York Times and ask students to share what they notice and wonder about it. This feature is completely free.

• We post these graphs on Thursdays, and include them in our free weekly newsletter, so teachers can plan for the coming week.

• Then, on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time, we host a live-moderated discussion where students from around the world post their observations and analysis while moderators from A.S.A. facilitate the student conversation.

• Your class can join the discussion any day of the week, not just Wednesdays, and students can even comment on graphs in our archive.

• On Thursday afternoons, a week after we publish each graph, we add a “reveal” to the post which includes additional background about these graphs, shout-outs for great student headlines, and relevant statistical concepts.

You can find all the graphs we have ever published, organized by topic and graph type, in two collections: 69 graphs from 2017-2020 (published in 2020) and the 79 graphs from 2020-2023, listed below. You can also find also find them in this column, which continually updates as we publish new graphs each school year.