Teach the Earth > Teaching Methods > Teaching with Visualizations

Teaching with Visualizations

This resource received an Accept or Accept with minor revisions rating from a Panel Peer Review process

These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:

  1. scientific accuracy and currency
  2. usability and
  3. pedagogical effectiveness
Reviewers rated the resources:
  1. Accept
  2. Accept with minor revisions
  3. Accept with major revisions, or
  4. Reject.
They also singled out those resources they considered particularly exemplary, which are given a gold star rating.

Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.


This page first made public: Dec 1, 2006

This material was originally created for Starting Point:Introductory Geology
and is replicated here as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service.
Created by Bob MacKay, Clark College.

What are Visualizations?

Visualizations can present massive amounts of information to help scientists identify relevant patterns and processes in nature. Data visualization techniques range from simple pie charts or x-y scatter plots to colorful contour plots and 3-D images that can be manipulated and viewed from a variety of orientations and with a variety of color schemes. Spreadsheets like Excel have good basic graphing capabilities which are in essence visualizations. We have discussed the use of Excel for graphing data and model output in several examples. Our primary focus here will be the more sophisticated visualizations, which allow one to visualize multidimensional data.

Typically, visualizations for multidimensional data sets allow the users to:

Visualizations typically fall into one of the categories below:


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