Title: “Assessing Scientific Visual Literacy: A look at the disciplinary discourse and cognitive effects of visual representation in the molecular life sciences”
Jessie Arneson, PhD candidate
2:30 p.m. BIotechnology Life Sciences Building Room 402
Abstract: Visual representations, abundant in all scientific disciplines, allow complex concepts, hypotheses, and data to be communicated between scientists and to the general public. To effectively convey or extract information from visual representations, an individual must possess a certain level of scientific visual literacy. Since visual literacy skill development is essential to the training of both future scientists and scientifically-literate citizens, it should be included as an explicit learning outcome of undergraduate science curricula.
We argue here that becoming visual literate requires that students gain fluency with the visual language of scientific representations as well as the ways in which scientists use them. To this end, we introduce and describe the development of two instructional tools that can be utilized by instructors and researchers interested in improving and understanding the nuances of scientific visual literacy. The Taxonomy of Visual Abstraction (TVA) classifies representations based on the abstractions most commonly used by scientists, while the Visualization Blooming Tool (VBT) builds upon Bloom’s Taxonomy to characterize the different cognitive skills scientists use when making sense of or creating visual representations. Further, we demonstrate how they can be applied to analyze and redesign course activities and assessments to support visual literacy skill development in an undergraduate biochemistry course.
We found, however, that simply increasing practice with visual representations within a semester did not lead to improved performance on visual exam questions. Cognitive theories suggest two contrasting hypotheses as to how the addition of a visual representation on an assessment item may affect the limited capacity of the working memory. Utilizing the TVA and VBT, we crafted paired questions to explore how visual representation impacts the cognitive demand of and student success on exams across a molecular life sciences curriculum. Through the studies presented in this dissertation, we lay a foundation to support future instructional and research efforts to better understand and scaffold the development of scientific visual literacy skills.
