Developing Strategies for Instruction and Assessment of Infographics for First-Year Technology Students

Abstract

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...

A student-focused checklist for creating infographics

“…Analytical and decision-making skills are also engaged, and the projects provide opportunities for students to practice effective synthesis of concepts and information (Matrix and Jaigris, 2014;Ortiz and Redmon, 2020). Creating infographics offers another useful pathway for increasing students' visual literacy (Anderson et al, 2019;Dyjur and Li, 2015;Kardgar et al, 2017) afforded by student-created infographics: developing and refining digital media skills (Dyjur and Li, 2015;Jones et al, 2019;Matrix and Jaigris, 2014). Employers increasingly place importance on a candidate's ability to use not only standard technologies such as word processing or spreadsheet programs, but also more specialized tools and technologies such as image editing software and graphic design platforms (Jones et al, 2019).…”

“…Creating infographics offers another useful pathway for increasing students' visual literacy (Anderson et al. , 2019; Dyjur and Li, 2015; Kardgar et al. , 2017), a topic receiving increased attention within education.…”

Communicative Visualizations as a Learning Problem

“…Visualization instructors may recognize the generic student design specification: "I want the user to understand insights in the data" or worse, "I want the user to explore the data." Work in visualization pedagogy has produced rubrics and techniques for evaluating student visualization work, but this often follows conventional lines: does the visualization express a set of facts and can it be effectively read [37,44,53]. Neither students nor teachers have a clear way of articulating a design goal.…”

Infographic Pedagogy for First-year College Students

“…The previous study (Kardgar, Mentzer, Laux, Chesley & Whittinghill, 2017) provided sample course materials for teaching and assessing student's infographic in a design thinking course, at an undergraduate level, in a large research-based university. For that pilot study, two treatment and comparison groups were conducted, and student's infographics were analyzed.…”

“…Kardgar, Mentzer, Laux, Chesley & Whittinghill, 2017) is used for assessing student infographic.…”