Data Visualization for Education

• Data use is increasing rapidly within the education space
• Policymakers are under increasing pressure to use data to inform decisions, justify funding, and guide practice
• But, policymakers are often not statisticians, researchers, or quants
• Data visualization is a way to bridge this gap
• Proper data visualization will bring the data to the audience in a way they can understand quickly and use to inform decisions

http://jknowles.github.com/Jan2013SDPtalk

Data visualization is a tool for communicating a specific feature of a datset in an approachable and efficient manner

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good data visualization must always be better than a table.

1. Review data visualization principles and chart types
2. Look at applications in education data from an SEA
3. Challenges with administrative data and policymaking
4. Best practices and advice
5. What tools to use
6. Activity!

How can we improve this simple scatterplot?

There are a few things that all charts need. There are sometimes strong cases to deviate from these, but they are good rules of thumb.

• Axis labels and a title
  • These make the chart self-explanatory
• A legend
  • What is the unit in the graphic?
• A scale
  • How are units mapped to the visual space
• Annotations
  • Author and data source (depending on distribution)

• Charts and data are made up of dimensions (e.g. a bar chart is x and y)
• Additional dimensions can be represented by additional aesthetics or chart elements (e.g. color, size, shape, etc.)
• Dimensions can also be shown by multiple plots (e.g. a filmstrip)
• Smart use of dimensions allows us to increase the information density of our charts

How you turn dimensions in the data into visual cues for your audience is everything.