Educating Skillful Visualizers

Friday, March 30, 2018

10:00 am PT | 11:00 am MT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET

Presenters: Kim Kastens (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) and Tim Shipley (Temple University)

This webinar is part of a series supporting teaching with InTeGrate principles, using InTeGrate-developed and curated materials as tools.

Registration is closed.

Summary

Visualizations can be a powerful tool for both thinking and communicating. As with other tools, proficiency can be fostered through education and practice. But how? This webinar will share insights emerging from an interdisciplinary workshop held in conjunction with the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science & Education. The workshop group compiled, shared, and organized ideas from research and practice on:

• what cognitive and information resources do experts draw on when interpreting visualizations?
• how can we help learners extract insights from scientific visualizations?
• how can we help learners express their own ideas via visualizations?
• how can we assess learners' progress towards visualization mastery?

The scope of the workshop encompassed both concept-driven visualizations (e.g. flowcharts, diagrams) and data-driven visualizations (e.g. data graphs and maps). Although the workshop drew from across the STEM disciplines, for this webinar the examples will be drawn from InTeGrate instructional materials for teaching about the Earth.

Goals

At the end of this webinar, participants will have:

• Ideas for visualization learning goals that you might want to build towards in your teaching
• Knowledge of a toolkit of instructional strategies for fostering visualization competency
• Examples of classroom-ready activities that simultaneously foster both: (a) learning about the Earth and (b) improved facility with geoscientific visualizations.

Logistics

Time - 10:00 am PT | 11:00 am MT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET
Duration - 1 hour
Format - Online web presentation via Zoom meeting software with questions and discussion. Go to the webinar technology page for information on using Zoom. Detailed instructions for joining the webinar will be emailed to registered participants one day prior to the webinar.
Preparation - There is no advance preparation required for this webinar.

Registration is closed.

Please email Mitchell Awalt (mawalt@carleton.edu) if you have any questions about this event.

Presenters

Kim Kastens, Special Research Scientist, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Tim Shipley, Associate Professor, Psychology, Temple University

Program

Webinar Slides (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 66.4MB Mar30 18)

1) Welcome and introductory remarks – Mitchell Awalt, SERC

2) Webinar presentation - Kim Kastens and Tim Shipley

• Welcome
• Learning goals for "skillful visualizers"
• Quick glimpse at nine instructional strategies explored in the workshop (with polling on whether you use them)
• Deep dive into two strategies, illustrated with InTeGrate examples
• What strategies are you colleagues using?

3) Questions and Reflections by participants

4) Synthetic remarks - final remarks by presenters

5) Opportunities for further interaction - Mitchell Awalt, SERC

6) Webinar Evaluation

Resources

• Join the community discussion
• Educating Skillful Visualizers Workshop, August 2017 at Southern Maine Community College
• Workshop Findings

InTeGrate examples of the instructional strategies explored in the workshop

• Strategy #1: Learners create concept-driven visualizations to explain their ideas.
• InTeGrate example: Exploring Geoscience Methods: Unit 2: Climate Change after the Storm: Activity 2.2: Issue investigation: Step 7. In this module designed for teacher prep classes, students download, organize, and analyze geoscience data sets and forecast models. They construct working hypotheses about the links of causality and influence that may connect the variables whose data they have examined. Then they organize their understandings into a climate change concept map of their study area. The student instructions include explicit procedures for both constructing and evaluating the concept maps. Students provide peer feedback on each others' concept maps, and then revise their own group's concept map based on this feedback.
• Strategy #2: Instructor teaches distinctive forms or patterns that are that are important in the discipline.
• GETSI example: Analyzing High Resolution Topograph with TLS and SfM: Unit 3: Geodetic Survey of a fault scarp. As part of the preparation for a field collection of data across a fault scarp, the instructor gives a mini-lecture, with powerpoint, on "Introduction to Fault Scarps." Concept-driven visualizations are used to illustrate the morphological forms characteristic of normal/reverse/strike-slip faults; multiple scarp, composite scarp, and splintered scarp. Concept-driven visualizations and field photographs are used to convey the relationship between morphology and time since the fault was active.
• Strategy #3: Instructor teaches formal attributes of visualizations
• InTeGrate example: Water Science & Society: Module 3: Rivers & Watersheds: Summative Assessment: Topographic Maps and Surface Waters. For this online or blended course, the instructional materials provides explicit instruction on what contour lines are, how to make topographic profiles, and how to calculate slope. Students then use topographic maps to discern how water will flow across the landscape.
• Strategy #4: Learners use visualizations to persuade or convince others (e.g. peers, stakeholders)
• InTeGrate example: A Growing Concern: Unit 6: Creating an Agricultural "Fact Sheet." As the summative activity for the module, students create a fact sheet advising agricultural producers in their region about an aspect of soil erosion and climate change. The guidance for instructor explicitly states that students should consider how it might be best to present their information to the intended audience. Use of images is required, and the examples provided show both data-driven and concept-driven visualizations.
• Strategy #5: Learners create data-driven visualizations to answer a question or test a hypothesis.
• InTeGrate example: Ocean Sustainability: Unit 2: Ocean Acidification: pre-work: Plotting seawater data. Students access an online NOAA oceanographic data base, and use Excel to make time series graphs of sea surface temperature, pCO2, and pH. Later in the unit, they use these and similar datasets from other locales, plus a concept-driven flowchart visualization, to explore how these three parameters are linked.
• Strategy #6: Learners compare, contrast and critique multiple representations about the same concept or phenomenon.
• InTeGrate example: Climate of Change: Case Study 2.1: Climate Variability in the Equatorial Pacific. Students compare and contrast data maps of sea surface temperature from nine sequential years, looking for patterns and trends. Then they are given a Hovmöller diagram covering the same period of time (an alternative data visualization of sea surface temperature, with time on the vertical axis and longitude on the horizontal axis), and explicitly asked what this diagram tells them about sea surface temperature that they couldn't get from the standard lat/long map.
• Strategy #7: Learners translate between representations of the same concept or phenomenon
• InTeGrate example:
• Strategy #8: Learners use a model to make a prediction, and then use a data-driven visualization to test their prediction.
• InTeGrate example: Humans' dependence on Earth's mineral resources: Unit 2: Boom & Bust: How Econ 101 Relates to Rocks. Students use a concept map model to predict how certain events would affect a metal's supply or demand. Then they use time series graph data visualizations to explain how the data presented in the graphs support or refute their predictions.
• Strategy #9: Learners invent a way to represent a data type they have not previously encountered.
• (No InTeGrate example located)

A starting point for resources on creating visualizations

• What Makes an Effective Visualization?
• Research on Using Visualizations in Class
• Tools For Creating Visualizations