Interactive Qualitative Data Visualization for Educational Assessment

Abstract

Data visualization accelerates the communication of quantitative measures across many fields, including education, but few visualization methods exist for qualitative data in educational fields that capture both the context-specific information and summarize trends for instructors. In this paper, we design an interface to visualize students’ weekly journal entries collected as formative educational assessments from an undergraduate data visualization course and a statistics course. Using these qualitative data, we present an interactive WordStream and word cloud to show the temporal and topic-based organization of students’ development during instruction and explore the patterns, trends, and diversity of student ideas in a context-specific way. Informed by the Technology Acceptance Model, we used an informal user study to evaluate the perceived ease of use and usefulness of the tool for instructors using journal entries. Our evaluation found the tool to be intuitive, clear, and easy-to-use to explore student entries, especially words of interest, but might be limited by focusing on word frequencies rather than underlying relationships among the student’s ideas or other measures in assessment. Implications and challenges for bridging qualitative data for educational assessment with data visualization methods are discussed.