Comics Added to School Dashboards Help Students Actually Understand Their Data
If your dashboard charts confuse you, comic strips might be the fix.
Learning analytics dashboards are meant to help students make sense of their learning data to support reflection and decision-making — but their visualisations can be complex, particularly for students with low visualisation literacy. So researchers ran a qualitative study on how data comics can complement those dashboards. They interviewed 18 nursing students and 4 of their teachers about a multimodal dashboard containing visualisations with data comics explaining them. Analysis showed the data comics were clear, engaging, and helped make complex visualisations more accessible — though they must be carefully designed to avoid overwhelming students with information. The findings suggest that both students and teachers are receptive to data comics as a means of supporting the interpretability of learning analytics dashboards.
- Simple comic strips helped nursing students read school data charts that normally confuse people
- The study interviewed 18 students and 4 teachers, and almost all found the comics clear and useful
- The catch: too much comic detail overwhelms readers, so explanations must stay short
Why It Matters
Plain-language explanations turn confusing charts into decisions you can actually make about study, work or health.