“Not Another Bar Chart! Teaching Graph Choice” Webinar Recap

If you missed our special guest webinar, read on! Our guest presenter was Kristin Hunter-Thompson, founder of Dataspire. Kristin is passionate about data literacy and improving science education. The webinar brought together educators who were interested in building students’ data literacy, helping students in data collection, and making math fun and relatable. 

Data visualization is a life-long skill: many people find it easier to see patterns and trends through data visualizations compared to lists or charts of numbers. Interpreting data is key in many practical activities, such as paying bills, making consumer decisions, and understanding political trends.

Which Graph to Choose

The most common data visualization tools used by teachers in classrooms are pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, and scatter plots. But there are many other ways to visualize data included in the Next Generation Science and Social Studies Standards and Common Core math standards! Kristin shared that the graph type selection is guided by the question you are asking about the data. There are three types of questions about data: 1) comparisons, which compare two or more groups, 2) distributions, which look at the variability of a group, and 3) compositions, which look at how a total is proportioned into small groups.

The figure below identifies keywords and phrases used in each type of question and the graphs that would be appropriate. 

Not all of these data visualizations are appropriate for every grade level. To find out more information on which visualizations are appropriate for your students, visit https://dataspire.org/graph-type-matrix-resources. Using this matrix in your classroom will help students reframe their data and think about the questions they are asking and what the data tells them. 

Data visualization tools 

Kristin recommended Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel as easy graphing programs for classroom use. Other, more complex graphing programs allow students to easily sort and manipulate visual presentation of data: Codap, Tuva, and Data Classroom are all free data tools that are sync with Google Suites to upload data. 

More Information

To view all the information discussed in the webinar, access the webinar guide and the workshop slide deck. 

If you are looking for more information about how to teach data literacy and diversity data visualization in your classroom, access the following Dataspire resources: