Creating Clear and Effective Visualizations

Section Creating Clear and Effective Visualizations

Good visualizations don’t just display data—they help people understand it. Students need to learn how to choose appropriate visual formats and design them clearly so that their audience can quickly grasp the main message. A wonderful online tool called CODAP can help students dive into creating visualizations in a low stress way (just drag and drop), there are a bunch of tutorials here.

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codap.concord.org/get-started/tutorials/

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Checkpoint 72.

Students want to show how favorite lunch foods compare across different grade levels. Should they use a bar graph, line graph, or pie chart? Why?

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Hint.

Think about what type of comparison they want to make and what would be easiest for their audience to understand.

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Solution.

A bar graph works best because it allows clear comparison of categorical data (foods) across groups (grade levels). Line graphs are for showing change over time, and pie charts work best for showing parts of a whole within a single group. The key is matching the visualization type to the story you want to tell.

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Exploration 29. Try This Week: Visualization Design Principles.

Time needed: 25 minutes creating and revising visualizations

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The Process: Have students create a visualization, then improve it using these principles:

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1. Clear Purpose: What’s the main message? Can someone understand it in 5 seconds?

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2. Appropriate Labels: Does everything have a clear title and labels? Can someone understand what they’re looking at?

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3. Easy to Read: Are colors distinct? Is text large enough? Are numbers easy to compare?

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4. Honest Representation: Does the visual accurately represent the data without misleading?

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Elementary Example: Start with a basic bar graph of favorite colors. Improve by adding a clear title (“Our Class’s Favorite Colors”), labeling axes (“Colors” and “Number of Students”), using distinct colors, and making bars proportional to the data.

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Secondary Example: Start with a scatter plot of study time vs. test scores. Improve by adding trend line, clear axis labels with units, appropriate scale that doesn’t exaggerate relationships, and caption explaining what the data represents.

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Checkpoint 73.

What’s the most important skill for students to develop when reading data visualizations created by others?

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Hint.

Think about the foundation skill that enables all other interpretation abilities.

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Solution.

Before students can interpret patterns or draw conclusions, they need to understand what they’re looking at: What do the axes represent? What does each bar, line, or point mean? What units are being used? This foundational graphical literacy prevents misinterpretation and enables meaningful analysis.

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Students should learn to recognize when visualizations might be misleading and how to create honest representations of their data.

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Exploration 30. Spotting and Avoiding Misleading Visualizations.

Common Problems to Watch For:

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Truncated Axes: Graphs that start at a number other than zero to exaggerate small differences

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Inappropriate Scales: Using different scales to make comparisons look bigger or smaller than they are

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Cherry-Picked Time Periods: Showing only certain time periods that support a particular conclusion

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Wrong Chart Types: Using pie charts for data that doesn’t add up to 100%, or line graphs for unrelated categories

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Teaching Strategy: Show students examples of misleading graphs from media or create “before and after” versions where students fix misleading elements to make visualizations more honest.

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Checkpoint 74.

Students have data about daily temperature over a month. How can they practice representational fluency with this dataset?

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Hint.

Think about showing the same data in multiple ways to see what different representations reveal.

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Solution.

Students could create: (1) A line graph showing temperature change over time, (2) A histogram showing distribution of temperatures, (3) A box plot showing median and range, (4) A bar chart comparing average temperatures by week. Each representation reveals different aspects—trends, variability, typical values—helping students understand that different visualizations serve different purposes.

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