Evolving Forms of Visualisation for Presenting and Viewing Data

Teachers have been ‘visualising’ ideas or information that emerge from data for a long time. Mark books have provided teachers with ‘visual’, albeit normally numerical, records of pupil attainment and achievement, which they have used to generate views about progress, trends, or the identification of appropriate learning support, for example. The advent of information and communication technologies (ICT) has brought potential to provide perspectives from data in more visual forms; these visual forms would previously have taken a long time to generate, and would have been unlikely to have been dynamic (that is, updated with regularly changing background data, to offer up-to-date pictures). What differences have been made as a result of this potential? Has it meant that ‘visualisation’ of forms of presentation have changed, that forms of analyses have been introduced, that reliability and robustness have been more focused on, or that different types of needs have arisen? This paper will explore evolving visualisations of curriculum data, and will conclude that different forms of visualisation are being introduced, but do not necessarily make it easier for the teacher to identify necessary or precise detail (or to consider fundamental statistical questions or specific professional needs).