This paper discusses a research study that focused on middle grades students' abilities to read and to move between different graphical representations before and after instruction. The data analyzed were collected from a group of 76 sixth grade students who were in 3 different mathematics classes in a middle school located in central North Carolina. The ways that students made sense of information presented through graphical representations and made connections between related pairs of graphs were investigated. General conclusions indicate that students need to talk more about graphs, including talking about the structure of graphs and how this informs the statements that can be made about: (1) the information depicted by the graphs and/or (2) the predictions or inferences that can be drawn from the graphs. Contains graphs and questions used on written pre- and posttests. Contains 26 references. (MKR)