ERIC Number: EJ1377053
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1055-3096
EISSN: EISSN-2574-3872
Available Date: N/A
Teaching Tip: Evaluating Visualizations with a Compact Rubric
McHenry, William K.
Journal of Information Systems Education, v33 n4 p324-337 Fall 2022
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 interpretations matter for given problem situations. This paper describes how to structure feedback for these assignments. The few published visualization evaluation rubrics are mainly oriented toward how-to-do-it heuristics. This paper makes a contribution by presenting, defining, and giving examples of the use of an innovative compact rubric for evaluating visualizations (CRVE). This rubric eliminates some of the length and complexity of heuristic evaluation, focusing on interpretation and relevance. In a graduate business intelligence course, students showed definite improvement over the course of the semester in the construction of visualizations, telling a story with headlines, and striving for data exploration. However, higher levels of technical correctness of visualizations did not necessarily correspond to better interpretations. This finding underscores the importance of emphasizing interpretation through a feedback mechanism like the CRVE presented here.
Descriptors: Visual Aids, Scoring Rubrics, Feedback (Response), Data Interpretation, Graduate Students, Data Analysis
Journal of Information Systems Education. e-mail: editor@jise.org; Web site: http://www.jise.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive; Tests/Questionnaires
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A