In visual communication, people glean insights about patterns of data by observing visual representations of datasets. Colormap data visualizations (“colormaps”) show patterns in datasets by mapping variations in color to variations in magnitude. When people interpret colormaps, they have expectations about how colors map to magnitude, and they are better at interpreting visualizations that align with those expectations. For example, they infer that darker colors map to larger quantities (dark-is-more bias) and colors that are higher on vertically oriented legends map to larger quantities (high-is-more bias). In previous studies, the notion of quantity was straightforward because more of the concept represented (conceptual magnitude) corresponded to larger numeric values (numeric magnitude). However, conceptual and numeric magnitude can conflict, such as using rank order to quantify health—smaller numbers correspond to greater health. Under conflicts, are inferred mappings formed based on the numeric level, the conceptual level, or a combination of both? We addressed this question across five experiments, spanning data domains: alien animals, antibiotic discovery, and public health. Across experiments, the high-is-more bias operated at the conceptual level: colormaps were easier to interpret when larger conceptual magnitude was represented higher on the legend, regardless of numeric magnitude. The dark-is-more bias tended to operate at the conceptual level, but numeric magnitude could interfere, or even dominate, if conceptual magnitude was less salient. These results elucidate factors influencing meanings inferred from visual features and emphasize the need to consider data meaning, not just numbers, when designing visualizations aimed to facilitate visual communication.
- Award ID(s):
- 2020969
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10302201
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1970-1976
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
The following is a Theory paper that presents an ethnographic exploration into how concepts are situated in workplace and classroom settings. Situated cognition research demonstrates that different contexts wherein learning occurs and knowledge is applied shape our conceptual understanding. Within engineering education and practice this means that practitioners, students, and instructors demonstrate different ways of representing their conceptual knowledge due to the different contexts wherein they learn and apply engineering concepts. The purpose of this paper is to present themes on how practitioners, students, and instructors represent fundamental structural engineering concepts within the contexts of structural engineering design. By representation of concepts we mean the ways in which practitioners, students, and instructors portray and demonstrate their conceptual understanding of concepts through the social and material contexts of the workplace and classroom environments. Previous research on learning and engineering education has shown the influence that social and material contexts within these environments have on our knowing and understanding. The researchers use ethnographic methods consisting of workplace and classroom observations, interviews with practitioners, students, and instructors, and documentation of workplace and academic artifacts—such as drawings, calculations, and notes—to access practitioners’, students’, and instructors’ conceptual representations. These ethnographic methods are conducted at a private engineering firm and in 300 and 400 level structural engineering courses. Preliminary results indicate that instructors’ conceptual representations in the classroom aim to enhance students’ broader understanding of these concepts; whereas students’ conceptual representations are focused towards utility in solving homework and exam problems. Practitioners’ conceptual representations are more flexible and adapt to project and workplace constraints. These results seem to indicate that even when instructors emphasize broader conceptual knowledge, the academic incentives behind homework and test scores lead to more academically focused conceptual representations by students. Furthermore, practitioners’ conceptual representations indicate the necessity of conceptual fluency in the workplace, which contrasts with the rigidity of conceptual representations that students develop in the classroom. This comparison between workplace and academic conceptual representations enhances our understanding of the extent to which students, instructors, and practitioners share similar or different conceptual representations within the domain of structural engineering. This, in turn, may lead to guided curriculum reform efforts aimed at better preparing structural engineering students for their professional careers.more » « less
-
Concept maps have emerged as a valid and reliable method for assessing deep conceptual understanding in engineering education within disciplines as well as interdisciplinary knowledge integration across disciplines. Most work on concept maps, however, focuses on undergraduates. In this paper, we use concept maps to examine changes in graduate students’ conceptual understanding and knowledge integration resulting from an interdisciplinary graduate program. Our study context is pair of foundational, team-taught courses in an interdisciplinary Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM) graduate program. The courses include a 3-hour research course and a 1-hour seminar that aim to build student understanding within and across Urban Affairs and Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geosciences, and Business Information Technology. The courses introduce core principles of DRRM and relevant research methods in these disciplines, and drive students to understand the intersections of these disciplines in the context of planning for and responding to natural and human-made disasters. To understand graduate student growth from disciplinary-based to interdisciplinary scholars, we pose the research questions: 1) In what ways do graduate students’ understandings of DRRM change as a result of their introduction to an interdisciplinary graduate research program? and 2) To what extent and in what ways do concept maps serve as a tool to capture interdisciplinary learning in this context? Data includes pre/post concept maps centered on disaster resilience and risk management, a one-page explanation of the post-concept map, and ethnographic field notes gathered from class and faculty meetings. Pre-concept maps were collected on the first day of class; post-concept maps will be collected as part of the final course assignment. We assess the students’ concept maps for depth of conceptual understanding within disciplines and interdisciplinary competency across disciplines, using the field notes to provide explanatory context. The results presented in this paper support the inclusion of an explanation component to concept maps, and also suggest that concept maps alone may not be the best measure of student understanding of concepts within and across disciplines in this specific context. If similar programs wish to use concept maps as an assessment method, we suggest the inclusion of an explanation component and suggest providing explicit instructions that specify the intended audience. We also suggest using a holistic scoring method, as it is more likely to capture nuances in the concept maps than traditional scoring methods, which focus solely on counting factors like hierarchies and number of cross-links.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Aim Biomes, biogeographical realms and ecoregions have become central concepts of biotic organization and biodiversity research. Recent data‐intensive analysis has shown that, while ecoregions do delineate biotic communities, how distinct they are from one another varies considerably across regions and taxa. Given their central importance to global models of the earth system and to the development of conservation plans, it is key to understand in what regions, and for which taxa, ecoregion classification schemes best describe the underlying variability in biological communities.
Location Global.
Taxa Plants, animals, fungi.
Methods In this paper, we integrate ecoregion maps with data on spatially continuous changes in environmental conditions, biodiversity and species traits to quantify the descriptive power of ecoregions around the globe. Capitalizing on the troves of newly available global biodiversity data, we model the abiotic and biotic factors that describe how distinct ecoregions are from one another.
Results From an abiotic perspective, we report compelling evidence that, first, ecoregions are more distinct in tropical zones with higher temperatures, less temperature seasonality and greater rainfall seasonality. Second, we also find that ecoregions are more distinct in regions with steeper slopes. From a biotic perspective, we find that ecoregions tend to be more distinct for reptiles and amphibians than they are for mammals or birds. Likewise, ecoregions tend to be more distinct for smaller‐bodied species and, to a lesser extent, species at lower trophic levels.
Main conclusions While ecoregion‐based conservation planning can provide a crucial tool for developing holistic conservation interventions, we show here that the ability to capture and describe communities is not uniform across regions or taxa. In particular, ecoregions tend to best describe communities of small‐bodied species, less vagile and tropical taxa that are typically underrepresented in the scientific literature. While ecoregion classification schemes will continue to provide invaluable conservation guidance, we must think critically about when an ecoregional approach is best suited to informing management.
-
more » « less
Abstract Background Situated cognition theory suggests that representations of concepts are products of the environment wherein we learn and apply concepts. This research builds on situated cognition by investigating how concepts are tangible to a professional engineering environment.
Purpose/Hypothesis The tangibility of concepts in relation to social and material contexts was defined and explored in this study. Specifically, the conceptual representations of structural loads were examined within workplace and academic environments.
Design/Method A researcher conducted ethnographic fieldwork at a private engineering firm and in undergraduate engineering courses. Data sources from this fieldwork included the ethnographer's participant‐observation field notes, formal and informal interviews, and artifact documentation.
Results Findings from this study described how academic representations of structural loads are more or less tangible to the social and material contexts of engineering practice. Representations documented in the workplace were found to be tangible to (1) real‐world conditions, (2) project/stakeholder constraints, and (3) engineering tools. Conversely, representations documented in the courses studied exhibited various degrees of tangibility to none, some, or all of these three traits.
Conclusions These findings explicitly identify the ways in which representations of structural loads differ across academic and workplace environments and how these differences may contribute to the education–practice gap. Specific suggestions for making academic representations more tangible to workplace environments are provided based on findings from in the workplace, previous engineering education literature, and best practices observed in the courses studied. Future research considerations and the value of ethnographic methodology to situated cognition theory are also discussed.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/p4s7d
