Source: Forbes

To get younger students used to looking at infographics, why not use what they know: sweets. They will already have prior knowledge about the topic, since most kids have had a mouth full at some point. Let's face it, what better way to get them engaged in the information? Start with The Art and Science of S'Mores. It's not only "the perfect group camping treat," but also the perfect infographic for a group discussion. It has everything from a graph about the marshmallow roasting scale to the "eternal question" of how to roast them -- glowing embers or flames? Kids will savor the notion of thinking about all the different pieces of information.

Source: Classes and Careers

Two other infographics that focus on sweets that would be good to use with younger students are The Candy Industry and High School Sweet Tooth. Both provide a wealth of visuals, data and information. The Candy Industry is designed to look like a game board that starts with a brief history. Moving down the squares, you cross the paths of charts and consumption for a little math. Further along is the section on geography, complete with a map of popular candies by sale in foreign countries. Financial information is next, with leading manufacturers and the most popular candy by sales, M&Ms. Keep moving along the board for more math with weights and measures, including calories, and finish with some unusual candy ingredients. What's nice, too, is that this "sweet" infographic provides the sources used for creating it. Kids will also love looking at this one, because it is so colorful and full of fun facts they can sink their teeth into. It also is interdisciplinary in nature, covering a multitude of things for different subjects.

Source: Newsilike

The other, High School Sweet Tooth, claims to have created the graphic through a survey fielded to 500 Americans, ages 13-17, with the use of social networks. Not exactly scientific, but nevertheless interesting for the purposes of introducing younger students to the world of infographics. Like its counterpart mentioned above, this colorful and playful infographic illustrates the results of a survey that set out to gauge the candy cravings of teens. It provides chart data for how often they eat candy and where they usually buy it. It even has a little media literacy built into the survey that asked about recognizable slogans and how well candy could be identified without the packaging.

All three of these infographics make good instructional resources for working with students. The subject matter is familiar and provides an identifiable place to begin learning to analyze information, data and images that make up these types of visualizations. When you finish with these, try looking at "S'More."

It’s easy to recommend that students learn how to decipher an image. It’s harder to explain the specific steps of instruction that can help children comprehend the pictures they encounter.

P.D. Wilmot (1999) cites Dale’s and Seel’s (1994) earlier works in outlining methods of graphic communication. They point toward understanding literal meaning, inferring between the lines, and applying ideas in one’s own voice.

In our classes, we've used similar practices. Our approaches toward elementary and middle school learners have tried to be clear and systematic. Here are two formats that we’ve used successfully for several years in analyzing political cartoons and in questioning media advertisements.

Typically, we move through four steps in guiding students to interpret charts, maps, cartoons, infographics, and logos. These four steps progress from base-level identification toward more analytical and sophisticated skills. The understandings proceed from: 1) Substance, 2) Scaffold, 3) Story, and 4) So What?

By “Substance,” we mean the literal things that appear in an image. Regardless of meaning or significance, what actual items do we see? Is that a bear and a honey pot, a continent and an ocean, or a curved line and an arrow? Are there words or numbers in the picture? By listing all of the details, we can be sure that we’ve noticed all the necessary pieces before beginning to determine what they might mean.

“Scaffold” refers to how the image is constructed. What structures define the picture as a graph, or a map, or a painting? What are the relationships between the details? For example, is there a grid, or an x/y axis, or a table of rows and columns? Are there cartoon people of different sizes between a title and a caption? Are there percentages connected by flow-chart arrows? Are there lines of latitude and longitude? Are there keys or legends explaining the color-coding? Are there markings or symbols or abbreviations? By defining the type of image and its construction, we can identify how the details unite to create a meaning.

“Story” is the message or the meaning of an image. In other words, what is a picture trying to tell us? What is the opinion of the cartoonist or the narrative of the illustration? What is the take-away from the pie graph or the point of the cause-and-effect comparison? The “story” is the purpose of the military map or the corporate logo. It is the overall meaning of the graphic.

Finally, “So What?” emphasizes an image’s importance. Who cares? Why is the graphic valuable? What deeper significance can we construe? How can we put the image in its proper historical, financial, or media context? How can we glean ideas to apply in our own lives or in other situations? Why would we waste time examining this particular image? What are the larger, interesting conclusions to infer from this unique picture?

We try to remind ourselves that even though our students are bombarded with visual stimuli, they don’t always grasp how to parse the incoming images. We’ve cautioned before against assuming that students can intuitively “read” pictures and graphics.

If graphicacy refers to the roster of skills necessary to comprehend optical inputs, then we can communicate these skills by teaching the decoding and encoding of visual data. For us, decoding means judging, evaluating, challenging, or knowing the message underlying a cartoon, chart, or corporate brand. Encoding, on the other hand, is often the overlooked sibling in education. Encoding in many ways is the truer test of internalization, because it involves the ability to produce unique representations that reveal the layered skills of graphicacy. For us, encoding means creating, drawing, writing, or designing original and meaningful graphics.

Balchin and Coleman (1965) first introduced the term graphicacy to refer mostly to geography education. They meant to emphasize a spatial understanding that could not be conveyed solely by words or numbers. In his noteworthy paper, “Graphicacy As A Form Of Communication,” P.D. Wilmot (1999) of South Africa’s Rhodes University builds on Balchin’s, Coleman’s, and other scholars’ work to argue that an inclusive curriculum in graphicacy must be added to national standards.

Wilmot posits that graphicacy is equal to other literacies of oracy, literacy, and numeracy. Everyday encounters with pictorial representations, such as infographics, matrices, maps, logos, diagrams, word clouds, and icons, all require a “symbolic language” to translate ideas about “spatial relationships.” (p. 91)

Wilmot explains that specific mental skills are necessary to understand (decode) and to create (encode) graphic items. As he notes, “because perception involves both a physical process of ‘seeing’ and an intellectual one of interpreting, it is bound up with the development of cognitive skills.” (p. 93)

Most interesting in Wilmot’s thesis is that in scrutinizing early papers about information saturation (Fry, Gillespie, Glasgow, Van Harmelen & Boltt), he in many ways presages the modern harbingers of information overload (Palfrey & Gasser, Gleick, Weskamp, ASIDE). If the verdict is in about visual strain, then we genuinely “can no longer afford to neglect graphicacy as a form of communication.” (p. 92)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Oregon Climate Service

Source: MTA

Just like with any wall map or geography atlas, the students need help deconstructing the information presented in the graphics. Legends and keys and color-coding apply equally to time-tested maps and on-line infographics. Students need tools, time, and practice to decipher them.