Infographics: Critical thinking opportunity!

I love good data representation, and some infographics are good examples of data represented well. On the other hand, some infographics I run across worry me - I'm often uncertain about whether the research findings being presented include enough information for people to be able to understand/think about those research findings.

Which makes me think: maybe a good use of infographics in a psych classroom is actually as the basis of a critical thinking exercise!

Some potential examples:

• a person named Nora McAdams sent me an example via email called "Is the Future of Counseling and Therapy Online?" http://www.bestcounselingdegrees.net/online/ . An impressive infographic, I was looking for information from outcome studies about relative effectiveness of online therapy and didn't find it here. Maybe students could research that!
• if you search for psychology infographics online you'll find a LOT of long lists of them, and any of these might be great opportunities for students to "fact check" and think critically http://infographiclist.com/tag/psychology/
• we've posted many psychology infographics on the blog before http://teachinghighschoolpsychology.blogspot.com/search?q=infographic
• Some of them are just funny/cute - this one about the (somewhat discredited?) MBPI personality test and Hogwarts cracked me up http://teachinghighschoolpsychology.blogspot.com/2013/09/harry-potter-and-myers-briggs.html

Last note: if you haven't heard of Edward Tufte, he's an amazing designer who thinks deeply about ways to present data in elegant and compelling ways. Definitely worth a look. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/







posted by Rob McEntarffer