A Metacognitive Perspective of InfoVis in Education

Abstract

A critical phase in teaching is the effective design of educational contents. Instructors are phased with the dilemma of compensating on the volume and complexity that academic curriculum may entail, to easily accommodating educational content to learners. InfoVis or Infographics feature as a viable method to alleviate this problem through rich information and structured visual stories by taking advantage of the visual thinking of individuals and difficulties in information processing. A challenge, however, is the creation of personalized educational content that will dynamically adapt to users' intrinsic cognitive and emotional characteristics. We present a preliminary user study that explores two human factors, i.e., metacognition and motivation, which could enrich user models and guide the personalization process of learning material devised as infographic. Our results revealed strong influence of the two human factors in the learning process, while in cases suggest that may also be used as good predictors of academic achievement.