Educating Skillful Visualizers

The 2019 Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education will continue a tradition of bringing together a diverse community of practitioners and researchers engaged in the production, study, and application of visualizations to advance and promote scientific understanding. While this meeting has traditionally focused on how to make more effective visualizations, we will pivot to focus on how to educate people to become more proficient visualization users. For many creators of scientific visualizations, the viewers’ capacity to interpret and make inferences from visualizations has been taken as a given, whereas this interdisciplinary gathering will make the case for a bridge built from both ends. While visualization creators strive to create visualizations that convey information in ever more clear and vivid ways, educators strive to create learning experiences that deepen learners’ ability to make and use visualizations. Speakers will discuss the enormous task of figuring out how to teach reading and “writing” visualizations with a high degree of fluency as well as the ability to extract and convey subtle insights and meaning.