Visual Information Literacy: Definition, Construct Modeling and Assessment

Angela Locoro,William P Fisher,Luca Mari

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3078429

Abstract

A major problem in education and visual information design is that, while tools to measure people’s reading and writing ability with texts and numbers are ripe, the ability to properly process information from data graphics – an ability that can be called Visual Information Literacy – is still off the radar, and even less interest is apparently devoted to its evaluation. The purpose of this research is that of presenting an exploration of methods and tools towards the measurement of data graphics effectiveness and efficiency, and of proposing a definition of ‘Visual Information Literacy’, together with the design of a model characterizing it as a developmental skills progression that covers the cognitive abilities activated when dealing with data graphics. A final goal of this paper is to report a first round of results assessing the validity of the model designed, by bringing statistical evidence that data graphics comprehension depends on the matching of users’ ability and data graphics difficulty. The contribution of this paper is twofold: comparing the current research on Visual Information Literacy and advancing it by designing a model for its characterization to allow the design of a Visual Information Literacy measurement scale standard.

Highlights

AND MOTIVATIONSThe ability to understand and reproduce human written signs systems, usually called literacy,1 may rely on many codification tools: words, numbers, graphics, and the like
We considered the literature related to the current edition of the most important conference in the Visualization field (IEEE Vis6), together with some foundational studies and most recent advances about assessing Visual Information Literacy7 We referred to the Educational and Literacy Studies field
A theoretical model was proposed within a meta perspective strand of research, in the direction of yielding generalizability of hypotheses and results, after noting the limits, in this regard, latest results in state-of-the-art literature in the fields of data graphics design

Summary

Introduction

AND MOTIVATIONSThe ability to understand and reproduce human written signs systems, usually called literacy, may rely on many codification tools: words, numbers, graphics, and the like. Many literacy assessment tests, based on cognitive tasks, became a standard measuring instrument of student’s literacy with texts, with numbers, and even with ‘‘domain-based literacies’’.4. Despite these well established efforts to provide solid tools for educational assessment, the initiatives to envision cognitive models from which to start investigating how people process information are rarer. This lack of vision limits the pace of interpretability in ever faster shifting cultural horizons like that of the knowledge society we are living in [3]. Each definition is presented from the narrowest to the broadest scope, whereas (II-B) we start from a generic view to delve into specific models

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Conclusion