Data Visualization Literacy of Youth and Adult Science Museum Visitors
Börner, K., Maltese, A. V., Balliet, R. N., Heimlich, J. E., & Uzzo, S. (2015, April). Data Visualization Literacy of Youth and Adult Science Museum Visitors. In Session presented at the American Education Research Association Conference, Chicago, IL.
The Sense Making of Big Data project was designed to study how audiences in public spaces relate to and make sense of representations of large data sets. Ultimately, the project will inform the development of a traveling, hands-on exhibition that will enable visitors to create and utilize representations of data such as graphs and maps. In addition, the project hopes to create a foundation for the design of informal learning experiences that encourage participants to explore, engage, and make better sense of small and big data. This research is timely as the amount of data in our world is exploding, and the capability to analyze large data sets (big data) will become a key basis for all citizens to be data literate decision-makers. For the sake of this project, we operationally define big data as datasets that are nationally representative (e.g., energy usage by demographic), those that are nearly exhaustive for a category (e.g., calorie counts for common foods), or that allow for extended longitudinal analysis (e.g., climatology records).