While visualization tools offer unique and effective methods of delivering information, they are not commonly used ( Knobelsdorf et al., 2012). Why Data Visualizers Are Not Widely Used as Educational Tools Having a tool that helps teachers create visualizations through a simple process can allow teachers to include visualizations in their classrooms and help increase data science literacy. Additionally, these tools do not often guide the user on the best visualization practices, which can result in ineffective visualizations that fail to deliver on their desired outcome. For high-school teachers, finding datasets that engage and connect with students is a difficult task. Available tools provide methods to create charts but provide little support (apart from random samples of data) to help the user find relevant and effective datasets.
While current tools offer expansive collections of fancy charts, they fail to deliver the essential charts-bar charts, line charts, area charts, etc.-in a way that is simple to access for students and teachers. The time-cost associated with these limitations can prevent teachers from incorporating visualizations into their classrooms, and thus harm visual learners and reduce data and visualization literacy in students. However, available tools for creating visualizations are limited in accessibility due to their steep learning-curves, download requirements, sign-in requirements, and paywalls. While this would not result in students having the same understanding of data science and data visualization if they were to take an entire class on the subject, it would help some students retain key information better in general classes. In order to address the low usage of visualizations in classrooms, given that adding entirely new classes is extremely difficult, one must rely on teachers to incorporate visualizations into their classrooms. Yet, data science and data visualization classes are not widely common in high schools. With the rise in technology and big data, data and visualization literacy are becoming necessary skills for students preparing to enter the workforce in any field-and in the case of visualizations becoming increasingly more present in day-to-day life, visualization literacy is crucial in a time where misinformation is commonplace. Ricketts found that with current instruction mostly coming in the form of auditory and textual learning-written and spoken word-students who are visual learners underperform ( Ricketts et al., 2018).
They allow students to make sense of complex data that would otherwise be difficult to understand. Given that 40% of students are visual learners ( Ricketts et al., 2018), visualizations are crucial for students retention.
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