Educating Skillful Visualizers

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A team of researchers from Temple University and Carleton College will convene a workshop focused on educating students to be skillful users and creators of modern scientific visualizations, such as data graphs, maps, charts and diagrams. Such visualizations are now abundant in science textbooks, newspaper and magazine articles, and in scientific journal articles. In many cases, the article or chapter simply cannot be understood by reading the text alone; the visualizations carry essential elements of the message and many students find them challenging to understand. The workshop will bring together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, developers, and educators drawn from a variety of fields where using scientific visualizations is a key competency, including the full range of STEM disciplines. The workshop will focus on both social and cognitive processes and strategies that underlie learning with visualizations. Conveners and participants will work to synthesize what is known about fostering and assessing students' visualization proficiency, and will identify outstanding research questions. The main product of the workshop for the broader community will be a compilation of instructional and assessment strategies that are independent of discipline and show promise for helping to build students' proficiency with visualizations. The compilation will be made accessible through a widely used and freely-available website. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning.Researchers from Temple University and Carleton College will convene a workshop focused on educating students to be skillful users and creators of modern scientific visualizations, such as data graphs, maps, charts and diagrams. The goal of the workshop is to construct a set of visualization competencies that builds across the educational trajectory, is grounded in human perceptual and cognitive systems, is not tied to specific disciplinary visualization practices, and produces graduates who can develop and interpret visualizations of types that have not been explicitly taught. Learners who acquire this kind of trans-disciplinary visualization competency will find it easier to move between and collaborate across disciplines. They will increase their capacity to communicate about science, and thus help to bridge between science and the rest of society. To move towards these goals, this workshop will bring together a multi-disciplinary group including faculty, doctoral students, curriculum developers, professional development providers, visualization creators, and education researchers, working in a variety of fields where using scientific visualizations is a key competency. The workshop will have two strands: one focused on fostering learners' visualization competencies and the second on assessing those competencies and evaluating the effectiveness of visualizations and their use in education based on those competencies. For each strand, the conveners have cast a broad net for ideas that have been shown to work in some context and are potentially suitable for expansion across multiple contexts. Drawing on the participants' experience and expertise, the group will produce a compilation of instructional strategies that are independent of discipline and show promise for helping to build students' proficiency with data-based and concept-based visualizations. The compilation will be fleshed out with examples from multiple fields. In parallel with this gathering and cross-fertilization of existing knowledge, the group will identify key research questions about visualization learning that have recurred across multiple visualization-using disciplines.