Seeing and Understanding: Gordon Conference, Workshops, and Mini-Grants to Guide Visualization Research in Science and Education

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This 3-phase project brings together 120 leading international researchers and science educators for: Two workshops on assessment and visualization tools; a Gordon Conference on Visualization in Science and Education; and five collaborative Mini-Grants for exploratory research across learning communities. Support from NSF will leverage substantial contributions from participants and others to set directions for visualization research in the US and globally. The growth of a unique, sustainable multidisciplinary research and development community will be promoted. The interaction between visualization practitioners in chemistry, physics, and biology and researchers in cognitive and learning science initiated in previous workshops will be extended and deepened. Physical and biological scientists who employ visualizations in research and teaching will continue to be exposed to the cognitive science perspective, while cognitive and learning scientists will continue to grapple with the research challenges posed by new forms of visual representation in the sciences. Outcomes of Mini-Grants will guide future visualization research across learning communities. Research collaborations in visualization will be extended to several critically important new interdisciplinary fields. Special emphasis will be placed on visualization in nanotechnology and 3D-navigation in genomics and systems biology education. Practitioners in scientific research and education will workshop with cognitive and learning researchers to tackle the issue of how to assess the effectiveness of new forms of visualization in concrete design and assessment contexts. This will help establish a cycle in which the cognitively-informed design of visualizations is followed by careful evaluations of effectiveness, which in turn lead to the further refinement of the designs. The diverse learning communities at the conference will work together to enhance public understanding of science through visualizations. Finally, American researchers and educators will work with other global visualization leaders to share best practices around the globe and learn from each other.