Using Decoding the Disciplines to Elucidate the Mental Processes involved in Reading Graphical Data

A goal of many undergraduate majors is to improve quantitative literacy. This paper addresses one aspect of quantitative literacy, namely the reading of graphical data. Using the Decoding the Disciplines approach, we have identified graph-reading as a bottleneck and engaged three faculty in decoding interviews. The interviews revealed these mental moves in graph-reading: establishing a context or orienting to the graph (including understanding the axes), looking for a pattern in the data and generating a verbal statement about the relationship between variables. We found that graph-reading is an iterative rather than a linear process. Moreover, there was a consensus among the interviewees that faculty make assumptions about students’ ability to understand graphical data and that many students have not been taught, at least explicitly, how to read a scientific graph as scientists read them.