Students now have readily available and powerful tools to access, manipulate, combine, and visualize data. Acquiring data and visual literacy requires more than knowledge of how to use these tools. Students need to engage with assignments that challenge them to make relatively complex visualizations, interpret them, and explain why these…

This work reports on the implementation of a self-contained data-literacy exercise designed for use in undergraduate classes to help students practice data literacy skills such as interpreting and evaluating evidence and assessing arguments based on data. The exercises use already developed data-visualizations to test and develop students' ability…

This study surveyed 183 college and senior high school students' graph-interpretation competence in scientific and daily contexts. Specifically, whether students' graph interpretation in scientific and daily contexts differed across educational levels was investigated. Furthermore, the questions of whether students' graph interpretation competence…

Biologists use tree diagrams to illustrate phylogenetic relationships among species. However, both novices and experts are prone to misinterpret this notational form. A difficulty with reasoning with cladograms is that intuitive narrative conceptions of evolution as a linear progression interfere with perceiving the hierarchical relationships that…

Reaction coordinate diagrams (RCDs) are chemical representations widely employed to visualize the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters associated with reactions. Previous research has demonstrated a host of misconceptions students adopt when interpreting the perceived information encoded in RCDs. This qualitative research study explores how…

Data visualization literacy can be defined as "the ability and skill to read and interpret visually represented data in and to extract information from data visualizations" (Lee, et al., 2017, p.552). Within the information science profession, data visualization literacy is an emerging and increasingly important competency within the…

Many education researchers have advocated grounding abstract mathematical and scientific concepts in students' lived experiences, environmental interactions, and perceptions. This dissertation explores the causal effects of various grounding strategies in instructional settings, specifically on the topic of statistical sampling. The first chapter…

In the United States, teachers are expected to analyze data to inform instruction and improve student learning. Despite investments in data tools, researchers find that teachers often interact with data visualizations in limited ways. Researchers have called for data interpretation training for preservice teachers to increase teachers'…

Recent research on learning analytics dashboards has focused on designing user interfaces that offer various forms of "visualization guidance" (often referring to notions such as "data storytelling" or "narrative visualization") to teachers (e.g., emphasizing data points or trends with colour and adding annotations),…

This study identifies a population of students who have an intermediate amount of relevant content knowledge and skill for working with data, and characterizes their approach to interpreting a challenging data-based visualization. Thirty-three undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory environmental science course reasoned about salinity…

Histograms are widely used, but recent studies have shown that they are not as easy to interpret as it might seem. In this article, we report on three studies on the interpretation of histograms in which we investigated, namely, (1) whether the misinterpretation by university students can be considered to be the result of heuristic reasoning, (2)…

This study examines how geoscience experts and novices make meaning from an iconic type of data visualization: shaded relief images of bathymetry and topography. Participants examined, described, and interpreted a global image, two high-resolution seafloor images, and 2 high-resolution continental images, while having their gaze direction…

Quantitative and statistical literacy are core domains in the undergraduate psychology curriculum. An important component of such literacy includes interpretation of visual aids, such as tables containing results from statistical analyses. This article presents results of a quasi-experimental study with longitudinal follow-up that tested the…

In this paper, I describe preliminary work on a new research project in learning analytics at Arizona State University. In conjunction with an innovative remedial mathematics course using Khan Academy and student coaches, this study seeks to measure the effectiveness of visualized data in assisting student coaches as they help remedial math…

As aspiring professionals, pre-service teachers must become good consumers of educational research as well as competent researchers who can use tools of inquiry to improve their practice and conduct their own educational research. Many, however, resist learning research skills or find difficulties in doing so. This article presents ways in which…