FILWD Reading Club #2: Visualization Literacy in Elementary School

Report and reflections on our second FILWD reading club.

A couple of weeks ago we had a second round of the FILWD reading club. You may recall I started this new initiative back in March. The idea is to gather with a few FILWD subscribers, read papers on a topic, and meet for one hour on Zoom to discuss the papers.

The initiative is still in stealth-ish mode because I want to perfect the format before making it open to a wider audience, but you will keep hearing from me about reading clubs and their evolution. If you want to learn more and participate in the next one, just add a comment below in this post, and I will add you to the separate mailing list I have for it.

In any case, I am happy to report that the second reading club went really well. In the following, I’ll first give you an overview of the papers we read and then I’ll provide a summary of the main points we covered in our discussions. I will conclude with a reflection on the reading club format and how I plan to perfect it further for the next meeting (probably happening between the end of May and the beginning of June).

The papers

This reading club focused on two related papers; both on the study of data visualization literacy in elementary school.

• Basak et al. “Visualization Literacy at Elementary School.” In Proc. of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2017.

• Chevalier et al. “Observations and Reflections on Visualization Literacy in Elementary School.” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 38 (3): 21–29.

The first paper describes three main studies. In the first one, the authors surveyed five math textbooks and analyzed how visualization is employed in them. In the second one, they interviewed a group of teachers to understand their use of visualization for teaching. In the last one, they developed an application to introduce data visualization concepts in class and studied the impact of the application on students and teachers (through field observations and more teacher interviews).

The paper has many interesting contributions. Here I want to highlight the analysis of the collected images that led to a categorization of different types of visualizations, including tangibles, photographs, illustrations, abstract shapes, and spatially organized notations. What I like about this categorization is that it does not look like any of the standard charts we see in visualization and cover a much broader spectrum. Of particular interest is how relevant the role of tangible objects and abstraction is in the pedagogy of data visualization.

The second paper is from a similar group of authors and focuses more on reflections about visualization literacy and lessons learned from the experimental project described in the previous paper. One part I really like is the section on the State of Visualization Literacy, which focuses on a set of “thought-provoking teaching paradoxes derived from empirical data we collected and observations in the field.¹” Here the authors offer a series of contrasting statements such as “Visualizations are omnipresent in grades K–4 ... yet learning to interpret and create them represents only a small fraction of the curriculum.” “Teachers believe visualizations are intuitive ... yet many think children are not prepared.” I strongly recommend you to read at least this section. I found it particularly inspiring and it got me thinking about challenges in this space on a deeper level.

Our discussions

In this second reading club we used the following prompts to start the discussion:

• What is exciting about this paper? What do you like about it?

• What are the important limitations and challenges?

We devoted about 20 minutes to each paper and then we used another 20 minutes for an open discussion. As last time, the discussion was very lively. We had a group of ten people, and I was pleased to see that everyone was really engaged. Two participants were so kind to help us by being the scribe and the timekeeper (thank Eniola and Noëlle!) - an idea I implemented from feedback I received in the first reading club. As a result, the whole conversation was more structured and much easier to manage than the first time.

We touched upon many different topics. Here, I’ll provide some highlights.

It was fun to hear from one of our participants that she tried the application described in the first paper with her daughter. She was surprised at how her daughter was thinking in a different way while interacting with the game. In this context, we also mentioned the book “Drawing Data with Kids” by Gulrez Khan. I received the book recently and it’s full of data visualization activities one can do with kids. It is definitely something to try out if you want to get your kids exposed to the world of data.

A few of us commented on the implications of focusing on a specific age population. The study involved children up to K4. The discussion about ages leads to two main reflections. The first one is about when is the right age to introduce certain concepts. In the meeting I mentioned how in the homeschooling community (I homeschooled some of my kids for a while) it’s common to discuss this question because there is evidence that kids can learn some subjects like math much faster and attain equal proficiency even if they are introduced to it much later in their development. A similar question exists in visualization literacy. When is the right time to introduce our children to data and data visualization concepts?

The second reflection was about how the study results would change if applied to an older student population. For example, it would be extremely valuable to run a similar set of experiments with high-school students. If you are a researcher and are reading this you may be inspired to conduct this kind of research!

One of the main ideas discussed in the paper is the concept of “concreteness fading,” a teaching strategy in which concepts are first introduced with very concrete representations and then are progressively abstracted to make them work for more general cases. The image below, taken from the paper, exemplifies the idea.

Example of “concreteness fading” taken from Basak et al.’s “Visualization Literacy at Elementary School.”

The same information is presented in different ways, going from concrete pictograms to abstract bar charts. In this context, we discussed the idea of how this same concept could be utilized in many areas of data visualization, especially when readers need to be introduced to a new representation before they are able to interpret it.

One last thing we discussed is the finding that many people are uncomfortable with data visualization because they associate it to the discomfort they felt while doing math in school. It’s really unfortunate that some people have a negative reaction to the depiction of quantitative information. Those of us who are naturally attracted to data visualization can’t even imagine that someone may not feel the same sense of attraction, and that’s something we rarely acknowledge. In my lab, this is something we “discovered” in a project, and it makes me reflect on how little we know about why and how some people do not seem to care about using data visualizations. This is certainly something that should be investigated in more depth.

Reflections on the format

I feel this second reading class was better than the first one in terms of organization and format. By far the best choice was to reduce the number of papers to read from three to two. The reduction in the number of papers to read was so positive that I decided to reduce the number from two to one for the next reading club. Let’s see how this goes, but I suspect that a more minimalist approach will improve the experience even further.

One mistake I made was to record the meeting without making it clear that I was considering publishing the whole recording to parts of it. This is one of the reasons why I did not make these videos public, other than the fact that I had no time to process and edit them. I am still undecided on whether there is any value in recording the meetings and publishing at least an edited part of it. The biggest problem is that knowing that a meeting is recorded and part of it could go public may completely change the natural dynamics we have experienced so far. For this reason, I do not intend for now to make any recording public. I like the casual and relaxed nature of the conversations we had so far.

Future reading clubs

At the time I am writing this the third reading club is being planned. We have a date set for June 6. For me, three editions is the number needed to decide how to make this format evolve in the future. I feel like after this next one I may have honed the format enough to involve more people. In any case, if you are reading this and want to participate in the next meeting or just be added to the separate mailing list I have, add a comment below, and I will add your name and email.

So far, our focus has been visualization literacy and I plan to cover related topics for a while. That said, there is no reason not to explore other topics. As the reading club evolves over time, I will try to cover other topics as well. If you have ideas to suggest please let me know by writing a comment below.

1. Chevalier et al. “Observations and Reflections on Visualization Literacy in Elementary School.” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 38 (3): 21–29.