Authentic Visual Data Literacy: Project Page

Introduction to the Project

The 2016 GAISE Guidelines, in describing the collective thinking expressed in the statistics education literature about what a student should know and understand at the end of a first course in statistics, state that:

  • “Students should become critical consumers of statistically-based results reported in popular media, recognizing whether reported results reasonably follow from the study and analysis conducted”, and
  • “Students should be able to produce graphical displays and numerical summaries and interpret what graphs do and do not reveal”.

With data and graphical displays seeping into all facets of life, from news to entertainment, we could not agree more. However, graphs we see in our every day lives are often quite different than the graphs students are exposed to in introductory statistics courses.

In this project, we investigate methods for both the assessment and instructions of these skills in students.


Assessment

In this phase of the project, we investigate whether students can interpret what authentic graphs they may see in their every day lives do and do not reveal, how we can measure their skills in doing so, and how to support the development of these skills.

Project Contributors

In alphabetical order:

Funding

This project is supported by a grant from the University of Illinois Provost’s Initiative for Teaching Advancement.

Current Status

We have created a draft assessment to measure students’ authentic statistical graphical literacy. The assessment is intended to measure students’ ability to interpret what graphs reported in popular media do and do not reveal, via evaluating whether claims reasonably follow from the data portrayed.

We have also investigated how students interpret graphs from popular media and describe patterns in their thinking, specifically in terms of their thinking about biases as well as challenges they faced in drawing interpretations.

Presentations

Hunt, M., Petrie, M, Findley, K., & Rao, V.N.V. (2025, April). Challenges and opportunities for promoting visual data literacy [Poster Presentation]. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Research Symposium, Urbana, IL, USA.

Petrie, M., Hunt, M., Rao, V.N.V., & Findley, K. (2025, April). “It’s just quantitative”: Exploring students’ detection of biases in data visualizations [Poster Presentation]. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Research Symposium, Urbana, IL, USA.


Instruction

More info soon.

Project Contributors

In alphabetical order:

  • Ava Graczyk
  • Emily Buhnerkempe
  • Madison King
  • Reem Kharfan
  • V.N. Vimal Rao

Current Status

More info soon.

Presentations

More info soon.