Design and assessment of a geographic visualization tool to support earth science learning

This paper reports on the development and assessment of an animated and interactive geovisualization environment and on implications of this environment for learning about spatiotemporal processes. This environment, the EarthSystemVisualizer (ESV), is designed to facilitate learning about global weather. Our goals in designing ESV were (1) to evaluate two exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) techniques: temporal brushing and temporal focusing and (2) to determine whether an interactive geovisualization environment influenced problem solving strategies, approaches to learning, and students' ability to generate hypotheses about earth-science processes. Focus group sessions were conducted with both expert and novice users to assess an initial design for the ESV interface prior to conducting a task-based assessment of ESV use. Changes were implemented in response to the focus group results, including the redesign of a temporal legend and improved speed and direction controls. Our task-based assessment considered student reactions to components of the ESV, whether the ESV could be used by students to answer objective questions about global scale weather processes, and whether the system (particularly its focusing and brushing tools) had an impact on hypotheses generated about relationships among weather variables. The assessment revealed that focusing and brushing had little impact on students' ability to answer a series of objective questions. Performance suffered for students who were confused by the focusing and brushing tools. In fact, students without the tools performed better than did those who were confused by the tools, but students who understood the tools performed the best. We also concluded that the level of the visualization system must be well matched to the knowledge level of the user about the application domain: students who already possessed an advanced understanding of meteorology or climatology benefited less and were more critical of the system than students with an intermediate or novice level understanding.