This evidence-based practice presentation discusses the teaching of an infographics assignment to first-year technology majors at a large research institution. Infographics can be powerful and successful methods of presenting large, complex data sets to general audiences, and the growing importance of visual communication has been documented. With a goal of improving our instruction and assessment of visual communication skills, we compare infographics designed and produced by freshman students during Fall 2015 with those produced by Fall 2016 freshman students in the same introductory design course, and investigate whether freshman students' abilities to communicate graphically change or improve significantly with more in-depth instruction and guidance. Collecting, comparing, and analyzing student-produced infographics in this pilot study will help us begin to measure the effects and value of our course development in this important area of design communication. IntroductionInfographic is a visual picture to shows information, data and knowledge. The goal of infographic is to present information quickly and clearly. The importance of visual communication has been well documented. Statistician and Information designer Edward Tufte (1997) has written extensively about how indispensable images can be in representations of cause and effect, processes, motion, thought, and relationships. Infographics in particular are lauded as powerful and successful (when done well) methods of presenting complex and large data sets to general audiences (Tufte, 1997;Smiciklas, 2012;Lankow, Ritchie, & Crooks, 2012). An ongoing proliferation of multimedia communication also means that visual literacy skills continue to grow more and more valuable for students and college graduates, and teaching these skills is becoming important to multiple academic disciplines. Teaching visual literacy will ideally help students to interpret the mass of visual media they encounter as young people, and in turn help them to apply and extend those critical skills within their future careers. Kibar and Akkoyunlu (2014) have discussed the use of infographics as a tool for teaching visual literacy skills. They found that students become more powerful in information organization skills. Those skills are related to colors and fonts in which the students need more work to do. Similarly, Mendenhall & Summers (2015) outlined ways infographics assignments are helpful for teaching design thinking, synthesis of information, and research presentation. They mentioned that infographics could be useful for different kinds of research project and design. These infographics can help student to develop awareness of their project that they want to do it. Knowing the value of visual communication skills, administrators and instructors of an introductory technology course incorporate visual presentations and an infographic assignment into the final design project of the course. In this article, we discuss how this infographics assignment has been taught in a required course...

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Improving the learning experience is the purpose of integrating curricula and providing students with explicit connections between disciplines. However, the mainstream application of STEM Integration often forsakes academic areas which are not within the scope of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. If STEM Integration continues as a practice and method of instruction, care should be taken as to how it is applied. This paper utilizes a modified version of the Engineering Design Process Portfolio Scoring Rubric (EDPPSR) as a method of evaluating technology students' design portfolio in a design thinking course. Through artifact analysis using the EDPPSR, students' self-documented design processes are evaluated on twelve different elements. The purpose of this paper is to pilot the research methods of using the EDPPSR and multiple raters.

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