Denison Scientific Association: Learning To Detect Patterns in 2x2 Graphs

Effective data visualization and statistics education require helping viewers detect patterns in 2×2 graphs. These graphs, central to teaching factorial designs, place one predictor on the x-axis and another in the legend. Importantly, faculty with 2×2 graph expertise risk the “curse of knowledge”—the difficulty of imagining what novices miss. This talk describes experiments on what college students and other novices see, overlook, and misinterpret when learning to read 2×2 graphs. The findings suggest strategies for improving quantitative reasoning instruction and designing more effective data visualizations.