Section: New Results

Assessing Visualization Literacy

Participants : Jeremy Boy, Ronald A. Rensink, Enrico Bertini, Jean-Daniel Fekete.

Figure 13. Example of an Item Characteristic Curve, and how people’s abilities are plotted against a test-item’s difficulty to determine probability of success.

We described a method for assessing the visualization literacy (VL) of a user [14] . Assessing how well people understand visualizations has great value for research (e.g., to avoid confounds), for design (e.g., to best determine the capabilities of an audience), for teaching (e. g., to assess the level of new students), and for recruiting (e. g., to assess the level of interviewees). In this project we proposed a method for assessing VL based on Item Response Theory. We described the design and evaluation of two VL tests for line graphs, and presents the extension of the method to bar charts and scatterplots. Finally, we discussed the reimplementation of these tests for fast, effective, and scalable web-based use.

More on the project Web page: peopleviz/vLiteracy/home .