Sarah D Sparks writes for Education Week: “Graphics are often intended to engage children in learning otherwise dry material, such as data on a chart. Yet new research from Ohio State University suggests increasing charts’ artistic appeal can interfere with students’ ability to comprehend the information they represent.”
She’s reporting on a study out of Ohio State University. Published in the May edition of Educational Psychology, the research adds very little to our understanding of how complex information should be presented graphically but does bring our attention to how poorly teachers understand the graphical display of information. There’s the headline, but we can’t expect editors or bloggers at Education Week to understand the point of research coming out of our nation’s universities.
Instead of wasting space describing already-known hypotheses about instruction and assessment, I recommend simply disseminating information about the body of published evidence, including the 1990 book by Edward Tufte entitled Envisioning Information, available from Amazon.com, here. It was published 23 years ago, is still available today, and offers insights much greater than those in the current study.
Many other books by Edward Tufte get high marks from me as well. Check out one that’s on my shelves from 1992 entitled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, where I first learned that black-and-white graphics were often much easier for students to read and comprehend than color graphics. Adding extraneous information to graphics, such as color or a 3D perspective, draws attention away from the information being represented and its real meaning.
I only report on the study at Ohio State because Education Week seemed quite impressed with it. But instead of telling people who design graphical displays what they should already know, let’s add to our body of knowledge with our research and use the space in our most esteemed journals to improve the quality of public schools. We can’t afford to get lazy and give space to reports that don’t constitute actual news. We’ve heard them time and again in recent decades. Clearly, teachers aren’t reading.
