Evaluating the educational impact of visualization

Abstract

The educational impact of visualization depends not only on how well students learn when they use it, but also on how widely it is used by instructors. Instructors believe that visualization helps students learn. The integration of visualization techniques in classroom instruction, however, has fallen far short of its potential. This paper considers this disconnect, identifying its cause in a failure to understand the needs of a key member in the hierarchy of stakeholders, namely the instructor. We describe these needs and offer guidelines for both the effective deployment of visualizations and the evaluation of instructor satisfaction. We then consider different forms of evaluation and the impact of student learning styles on learner outcomes.

Getting algorithm visualizations into the classroom

“…• Trouble with finding suitable AVs: 13 These results are roughly the same as reported in [7]. We see here that the largest single category is trouble with finding materials.…”

“…Future plans are discussed in Section 6. Readers interested in background related to the history AVs, their level of availability, and best practices for their use in the classroom are referred to [16,9,7].…”

Animated Examples as Practice Content in a Java Programming Course

“…Even though sophisticated tools have been developed and evaluated, they frequently fail to meet their goals, because teachers and students simply do not use them [12]. Packaging interactive learning content into online practice systems such as Codingbat 1 has recently emerged as a way to decrease the teacher engagement threshold: teachers can now point students to these systems, rather than master these tools to integrate individual content items into their teaching.…”

Addictive links: the motivational value of adaptive link annotation

“…Many of these developed tools have been evaluated in the lab and small-scale classroom studies and proven to be useful. However, we have now learned that the mere availability of a good tool, although known as beneficial for students, is not enough to ensure its broad educational impact (Naps et al, 2003). An important issue for those who research the use of computers in education is to increase the effective use of student-driven educational tools.…”