Visual Communication Quarterly

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Developing a Visualization Education Curriculum

in the Age of Big Data Using the Dick and Carey
Model

Alon Friedman & Edward Schneider

To cite this article: Alon Friedman & Edward Schneider (2018) Developing a Visualization
Education Curriculum in the Age of Big Data Using the Dick and Carey Model, Visual
Communication Quarterly, 25:4, 250-256, DOI: 10.1080/15551393.2018.1530115

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Published online: 20 Dec 2018.

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Insight
Developing a Visualization Education Curriculum in
the Age of Big Data Using the Dick and Carey Model
Alon Friedman and Edward Schneider
W
ith the growing interest in Big Data,
researchers are calling for a
reframing of key questions about
what constitutes knowledge found
in very large data settings (Boyd & Crawford,
2012). Many researchers are developing new
ways to access and organize Big Data, and many
academic institutions are offering new courses
that focus on analyzing Big Data. Many Big Data
course syllabi require statistics and programming
as prerequisites (Friedman, 2017). It is common
for instructors to report resistance from students
to learning statistics (Schoenfeld, 1992). There
are a variety of reasons for this resistance—for
example, students may feel that statistics lack
vividness or the ability to engage their emotions
(Hill, 2004). While there is already a large body
of research on the benefits of visuals in education
(Gilbert, 2008), a review of this literature could
not produce a detailed model for a visualization-
centric statistics curriculum at the undergraduate
level.
The article describes the development of a unique
course curriculum that privileges visualization in
statistics instruction. This study was designed to
answer two questions: How can we outline an
efficacious visualization curriculum using the
Dick and Carey model? How do students in this
curriculum respond to the use of open source R
as a platform for producing visualization? To
address these questions, we conducted a student
feedback survey in our advanced visualization
class to measure the students’ evaluation of
visualization instruction in statistics, using open
source R as our platform. The study reports on a
roadmap for implementing visual representations
of data using a statistics framework and open
source R as the leading software. The results also
indicate positive student attitudes toward the
technology used in the course.
Visual Communication Quarterly 250
Literature Review
Visualization Education
In today’s social media environments, the term
visualization generally means the process of
mapping data using encoding techniques to
maximize human understanding of the data.
Even before digital technologies became
commonplace, visualization was widely used in
higher education. Visual content has appeared in
textbooks, instructional manuals, classroom
presentations, and web interface extensions for
generations (Stokes, 2002). Visualization,
moreover, is a skill that should be taught (Domik,
2000).
The major difficulty in the teaching of
visualization is that there is no single
methodology, grammar, or syntax in visualization
education, unlike in statistics or writing. Gelman
and Unwin (2013) showed that users can
visualize data in many ways, from simple bar
charts to more complex scatterplots based on user
experience, but they did not suggest a curriculum
for teaching visualization. Adding to the
confusion, there is no single comprehensive
resource on the subject of student assessment in
visualization education. Teachers frequently use
visualizations to express information, but
students rarely receive instruction on how to
express ideas through visualization themselves
(Snee, 1993). In fact, we found no studies that
examine visualization as a central piece of the
statistics curriculum.
Statistical Pedagogy
Many statistical educators have reported on their
students’ anxiety about statistics (see, e.g., Cruise,
Cash, & Bolton, 1985). Due at least in part to this
Volume 25 October – December 2018
Figure 1 The Dick and Carey Model of Instructional Design (Dick & Carey, 1990).
student anxiety, there is a consistent belief in the
statistical community that significant pedagogical
changes must be made (Snee, 1993; Moore,
1997). In 2016, the American Statistical
Association (ASA) recommended increasing
students’ technology and visualization skills and
improving their understanding of abstract ideas
through the use of simulations. However, the
report did not include a recommendation of
technology tools that might be used to achieve
these goals. Matching technology tools aimed at
assisting the teaching of statistics to educational
objectives is an additional challenge.
In the late 1990s, a new approach was developed
to enhance the student experience using open
source technology. (For a description of the
successful use of open source technology in a
graduate-level statistical course, see Forbes,
2012). Among the leading open source statistical
applications is one titled open source R. As an
open source program, it is free to use, and its
popularity reflects a shift in statistical computing
toward visualization output. The two highest-
profile student-focused projects involving open
source R are OpenIntro.org, developed by Diez,
Barr, and Çetinkaya Rundel (2014) at UCLA,
and statsTeachR.org, created by Reich,
Goldsmith, and Foulkes (2014) at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst. These projects aim
to teach statistics by using open source R as an
alternative to traditional software. Recognizing
the importance of visualization as a pedagogical
practice, we designed a statistics curriculum that
privileges this practice as opposed to treating it as
an add-on to traditional teaching approaches.
Pages 250–256
Methods
The objectives of this study were to develop a
curriculum based on visualization for teaching
statistics and then to assess student attitudes
toward the technology used in the curriculum. To
achieve these goals, we used the Dick and Carey
model to develop three new courses whose
central aim was to introduce statistics and
visualization to information science
undergraduate students. The Dick and Carey
instructional design model provides a systematic
orientation that structures learning in a way that
puts the learners’ interests first, while
incorporating feedback at all levels of the design
process to improve teaching. This model is widely
used because of its simplicity and linearity (Dick,
1996). The model is composed of 10 steps, as
shown in Figure 1, originally outlined by Dick
and Carey (1990).
The lack of visualization education models that
give systematic guidelines for teaching and
assessment procedures motivated us to choose
the Dick and Carey model. While the model is
not linear, in this article the steps we followed to
create our curriculum are presented in order for
ease of explanation.
Role of the Researchers
During a period of curriculum development, the
faculty of the School of Information at the
University of South Florida (USF) realized that
the school had an interest in seeing its students
gain visualization skills in addition to a grasp of
statistics. Consequently, in 2013, the School of
251 Visual Communication Quarterly
Information joined forces with the Department
of Mass Communication in an initiative to build
their undergraduate students’ data analysis and
visualization skills. This effort involved the hiring
of faculty specifically designated to focus on
visual communication using blended
methodologies that combine traditional and
online classes. These faculty members, including
the authors of this article, were given the ability
to design three new courses that coordinate with
the university’s standard Introduction to Statistics
course to produce a four-unit block of courses
providing a foundation in visual communication,
statistical visualization, and Big Data. This effort
took place in the context of a larger university-led
effort to improve visualization skills.
Study Population
The undergraduate students in the School of
Information and School of Mass Communication
are training to work in fields such as digital
communication, database administration, and
archiving. The movement toward social media
analytics pushed our curriculum toward statistical
and visualization content. One of the main goals
was to teach students to communicate data in a
clear and efficient fashion. As a result, the
curriculum was entitled Visual Analytics and
Communication.
The Florida Department of Education’s 2014
Mathematics Standards have specific
requirements concerning applied statistics in
higher education. However, the only explicit
visualization aspects of Florida’s mathematics
curriculum are found in geometry. Thus, the
students enrolled in this visualization initiative
could be expected to have some background in
statistics but very little background in
visualization beyond basic topics like the
interpretation of frequency histograms.
Curriculum Creation
The first step of the Dick and Carey model is
identifying instructional goals. We set three broad
goals for our project:
1. To prepare students to solve statistical
problems and effectively communicate their
results using visualization techniques;
2. To produce students who can apply visual
communication principles in statistical
analysis;
3. To ensure that students have a positive
attitude toward the use of statistics in
analysis and decision making.
In our second step, we conducted a detailed
Visual Communication Quarterly
analysis of the goals set in the first phase. We
interviewed past and current faculty members
from our departments to review how they taught
statistics and conducted interviews with current
students who had expressed an interest in joining
our program. We also interviewed colleagues
from industry to help us determine what type of
skills they expected when hiring recent graduates.
Based on our analysis, we set up our goals and
curriculum.
The third stage of the Dick and Carey model is a
needs analysis in which instructional developers
examine the gap between what users know at the
beginning and the desired state of understanding
at the end. In this phase, we identified a large
difference between the skills students possessed
upon entering this curriculum and what we
wanted them to be able to do, particularly as
high-school-level skills in statistics are
overwhelmingly focused on simple problem
solving in a sterile test environment. The goal of
our program is for students to apply these
techniques in real-world settings. These factors
led to the choice of open source tools for class
projects.
To develop performance objectives, we
considered how content could be grouped to best
address the potential learning problems identified
earlier, especially in the context of the students’
learning demographics. We developed a
pedagogical framework that encouraged students
to become personally involved in statistical
production. Knowing that visualization can
reduce anxiety and help emphasize concepts over
procedures, we chose to move visualization to the
front of the sequence.
We decided to address visualization on two
levels. The first level was in the design and
development of individual visualizations for
communication. The second was in the
structuring of multiple visualizations for
communication and analysis associated with
statistics analysis. As an alternative to the
traditional Introduction to Statistics course
offered by the Department of Statistics at USF,
we offered a curriculum divided into three
courses.
The first course, Introduction to Visual
Communication (VIC3001), was a survey
designed to give students a foundational
knowledge of the many forms visual
communication can take and to provide hands-on
experience in developing projects. VIC3001
spanned a wide range of areas, including visual
persuasion, data visualization, and visual
storytelling. Our second course, Graphics in
252 Volume 25 October – December 2018
Visual Communication, covered pixel graphics-
based projects on image sequencing for
storytelling and map making. In contrast to the
first two courses in the sequence, the third course,
Visualization of Big Data, focused on Big Data
and was based on statistical theory. The class
covered three basic statistics paradigms
(descriptive, inferential, and predictive), and it
required students to use open source R to analyze
and produce visualizations.
In the next stage of our curriculum planning, we
developed assessments for the courses. Our
decisions about student assessment were guided
by a consideration of what kinds of deliverables
we wanted students to be able to produce and
how we would evaluate them. We then correlated
our goals to the required theoretical
underpinnings. Our choice of instruments was
influenced by the fact that a majority of the
student assignments in our curriculum involved
project development. Portfolio development is a
goal of the two schools involved in this effort,
and thus projects that result in materials fit for a
professional portfolio are encouraged.
In our introductory class, Introduction to Visual
Communication, project work was designed to
give students hands-on experience in applying
theoretical concepts to design and development
projects. One of the first projects required
students to collect their own data to produce a
plot.ly graph. (Plot.ly is a free web-based visual
graph and statistical tool.) Other projects focused
on visual persuasion and interactive media
visualization. Our second class, Graphics in
Visual Communication, was also designed
around projects that increased student skills. The
course taught students how to combine pixel and
vector graphics. In the third class, Visualization
of Big Data, students learned statistical
methodologies and used open source R and the
ggplot package to produce their visualizations.
The students produced visual representations that
addressed the specific type of analysis or
statistical methodologies covered during that
phase of the class.
We then developed instructional materials using
multiple platforms for each class. These materials
ranged from social media platforms to print
books and software applications. However, we
are still looking for materials that will cover all
three classes.
We evaluated the curriculum through a survey
administered at the end of the Visualization of
Big Data course in 2015. This survey was
primarily summative, but it had a formative
component in that it elicited student feedback
Pages 250–256
Figure 2 Students’ evaluation of open source R.
that we planned to use to help us refine the
course in subsequent iterations. Participation was
voluntary, but all 50 of the students enrolled in
the course filled out the form. Of these students,
38% were women and 62% were men, with an
average age of 24. No other demographic
information was collected. The survey was
conducted independently of the University of
South Florida’s standardized student evaluation.
It used open-ended questions and a Likert-scale
questionnaire. We used frequency analysis to
calculate their responses. The questionnaire
assessed student attitudes toward open source R,
toward statistics in general, and toward
visualization output. In the section on R, the
students were asked to numerically evaluate open
source R based on appreciation, access, support,
productivity, abilities, and flexibility.
The final step of the Dick and Carey model
indicates that the instructor should evaluate the
curriculum and begin the iterative process once
again. As of this writing, no major revision had
yet been conducted, but we will continue to
analyze and update the curriculum and the
technology and will search for better ways to
evaluate students’ visualization work.
Results
Our results indicated that using visualization can
be a strong factor in helping undergraduate
students to understand statistics. On the
evaluation, the majority of the students reported
positive attitudes toward open source R as a
platform for using statistics to produce
visualizations. Figure 2 summarizes the results of
this evaluation.
253 Visual Communication Quarterly

Figure 3 Student project using predictive analytics.
In our questionnaire, as described previously, the
students were asked to rank the attributes of R
and its connection to visualization and statistics.
The attribute “powerful” ranked at the top, with
89% of the students reporting that R was a
powerful way to produce visualizations and data
analysis. Additionally, 76% of the students
reported that the application was accessible. The
lowest evaluation was of the support R provides
to new users, with only 4% of students
responding that it provided such support. In their
answers to open-ended questions, many of the
students stated that they found a semester to be
insufficient time to collect and analyze data and
visualize the results. They also, however,
emphasized the value of open source R for
understanding statistics, as indicated in these
typical student comments:
I certainly had my struggles with R to create
visualization, and I still struggle
understanding [. . .] the complexity of
visualization and visualization creation using
R. However, using the creation of
visualization in R helped me to understand
the statistics analysis.
I am very familiar with Adobe software
product line, but this course introduces me to
R capabilities to produce visualization,
which is a new experience. I learned in this
course about the complexity of visualization
through R, something no other visual
communication course covers.
Visual Communication Quarterly
The students’ projects illustrate their ability to use
open source R to make sense of statistical topics
that interested them. Figure 3 shows a student’s
use of predictive analytics to analyze his grade in
the class and predict his final grade, using a grade
scale of 1–5.
Figure 4 shows a student project that combined a
map of the world with Twitter feeds to analyze
the geographical provenance of users’ retweets
regarding the Daytona International Speedway, a
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series motor race.
Discussion
The results of the evaluation indicated that the
students thought using open source R helped
them learn both statistics and visualization.
Ninety-two percent of students strongly agreed
that learning visualization with open source R
was useful. Eighty-three percent of students
strongly agreed that learning statistics using open
source R was useful. We also found that teaching
students to use visualization as a means of
communicating statistical analysis encouraged
student engagement. This finding was illustrated
by the questionnaire, on which students reported
that they felt that R was a powerful application
and gave them good opportunities to use statistics
to produce their analyses and visualizations.
Using the Dick and Carey model allowed us to
build a curriculum that specialized in
visualization, providing students with an
understanding of math and statistics and teaching
them to transform their results into visual
depictions. This curriculum has continued to
evolve due to changes in students, instructors,
and visualization software.
Limitations and Conclusion
The most significant limitation of the study was
that we were unable to empirically measure the
student visualization outcomes. This deficiency
in visualization education stands out in
comparison to other fields in higher education
(statistics, writing studies, and even computer
programming). This gap had a direct effect on
this study, as we could not measure the
instructors’ visualization evaluations due to the
lack of standard procedure even among
ourselves. Future studies can address the
assessment of student visualization work.
The teaching of visualization is a relevant way to
address the challenge of statistical education,
especially for nonstatistical majors (Spurrier,
2001). In this study, we outlined a visualization
curriculum using the Dick and Carey model. Our
254 Volume 25 October – December 2018
Figure 4 Student project analyzing retweets about the Daytona International Speedway.
analysis revealed that students who used our
curriculum became more open to producing
visualizations based on statistical frameworks. As
we continuously adjust our curriculum, we hope
that others will consider putting the visual first in
statistics education and help us assess this
alternative approach to teaching visualization
and statistics.
Pages 250–256
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ORCID
Alon Friedman 0000-0003-2621-0906

Alon Friedman is an assistant professor in

Visualization and Data Science at the University of
South Florida. He has published articles on visual
grammar and big data. He is a member of IEEE Vis
and Open Source R. He teaches visual
communication, big data visualization, and visual
analytics.
E-mail: alonfriedman@usf.edu; https://sites.google.
com/view/alonfriedmansite/home

Edward Schneider is an associate professor in

Strategic Communication at Ithaca College. He has
been published in leading journals on animation and
3-D. He teaches visual communication and
animation.
E-mail: eschneider@ithaca.edu; https://faculty.
ithaca.edu/eschneider/

Visual Communication Quarterly 256 Volume 25 October – December 2018