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This evidence-based practice presentation discusses the teaching of an infographics assignment to first-year technology majors at a large research institution. Infographics can be powerful and successful methods of presenting large, complex data sets to general audiences, and the growing importance of visual communication has been documented. With a goal of improving our instruction and assessment of visual communication skills, we compare infographics designed and produced by freshman students during Fall 2015 with those produced by Fall 2016 freshman students in the same introductory design course, and investigate whether freshman students' abilities to communicate graphically change or improve significantly with more in-depth instruction and guidance. Collecting, comparing, and analyzing student-produced infographics in this pilot study will help us begin to measure the effects and value of our course development in this important area of design communication. IntroductionInfographic is a visual picture to shows information, data and knowledge. The goal of infographic is to present information quickly and clearly. The importance of visual communication has been well documented. Statistician and Information designer Edward Tufte (1997) has written extensively about how indispensable images can be in representations of cause and effect, processes, motion, thought, and relationships. Infographics in particular are lauded as powerful and successful (when done well) methods of presenting complex and large data sets to general audiences (Tufte, 1997;Smiciklas, 2012;Lankow, Ritchie, & Crooks, 2012). An ongoing proliferation of multimedia communication also means that visual literacy skills continue to grow more and more valuable for students and college graduates, and teaching these skills is becoming important to multiple academic disciplines. Teaching visual literacy will ideally help students to interpret the mass of visual media they encounter as young people, and in turn help them to apply and extend those critical skills within their future careers. Kibar and Akkoyunlu (2014) have discussed the use of infographics as a tool for teaching visual literacy skills. They found that students become more powerful in information organization skills. Those skills are related to colors and fonts in which the students need more work to do. Similarly, Mendenhall & Summers (2015) outlined ways infographics assignments are helpful for teaching design thinking, synthesis of information, and research presentation. They mentioned that infographics could be useful for different kinds of research project and design. These infographics can help student to develop awareness of their project that they want to do it. Knowing the value of visual communication skills, administrators and instructors of an introductory technology course incorporate visual presentations and an infographic assignment into the final design project of the course. In this article, we discuss how this infographics assignment has been taught in a required course...
She is interested in exploring the effects of using technology to enhance students' learning. Further, she is interested in understanding the ways and interventions that can be designed to deal with conceptually hard concepts in STEM courses especially programming and software engineering courses. Prior to Purdue University, Saira worked as Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department at Forman Christian College (A Chartered University) at Pakistan for eight years and was recognized for outstanding teaching with the year 2013 teaching award. Saira was also the recipient of "President of Pakistan Merit and Talent Scholarship" for her undergraduate studies.
This research paper builds upon an ongoing exploration of a large-scale, interdisciplinary course integration for first-year Technology majors. Our research begins to show that the program is making measurable differences to students' learning, engagement, and sense of community. Administrators and instructors from 2 colleges within the university collaborated to organize and teach paired sections of Technology, English, and Communication courses. All 3 classroom instructors in each set of sections work together within the Integrated First-Year Experience, which ultimately aims to tie essential skills and concepts from the humanities and STEM fields to realistic global problems and contexts. The program was implemented for more than 500 firstyear students in each academic year (2015-16 and 2016-17). Our research responds to questions about the potential for integrated courses to improve students' conceptual learning and engagement with the university, and about the most effective ways for instructors and administrators to plan, support, and implement this kind of integration. We demonstrate the potential for interdisciplinary pedagogy generally and STEM-Humanities integration in particular to improve students' perceived learning transfer and sense of academic engagement. IntroductionThis research responds to questions about the potential for integrated courses to improve students' conceptual learning and engagement with the university, outlines our methods of evaluating a large-scale course integration, and discusses effective ways for instructors and administrators to plan, support, and implement strong integration. With this paper, we build upon an ongoing exploration of a large-scale, interdisciplinary course integration for first-year Technology majors: the Integrated First-Year Experience. This course integration program grew out of the recognition that Technology students seem to struggle effectively expressing design ideas, while student work in English and Communication courses can sometimes seem to lack a meaningful context outside of the classroom. To address these concerns, and with a goal of enriching the first-year experience for students, administrators and instructors from Purdue's Polytechnic Institute, English Department, and School of Communication all collaborated to organize and teach paired sections of Technology, English, and Communication courses. The resulting Integrated First-Year Experience brings humanities and STEM fields into cooperation, asking instructors from both to collaborate at the classroom level. The program's overall goal has been to improve student learning, transfer, academic engagement, and sense of community.
Infographics are an effective way to present complex and large data. In the 21st century, having design skills to promote the ideas and be able to find a larger audience is crucial for success. Hence, it is important to equip young students with this important design ability. In this work in progress research, the goal is to analyze and compare the students' infographics from two years study, with the total sample number of 92. For the second year, the research team designed new course material for the students and then evaluated the effectiveness of the new content, assessment and pedagogy tools. The proposed course material includes a new designed rubric with thirteen components for assessing students' infographics and the needed content pedagogy for teaching infographics. The students' infographics were graded in both years and the scores were analyzed, from which the statistics illustrated significant improvement in students' visualization skills. The results of students' grades show strengths and weaknesses related to different components of the new rubric. This study provides a complete description of this course content, assessment and pedagogy of teaching infographics to college students.
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