Assessing Affective Objectives for Communicative Visualizations

Abstract

Using learning objectives to define designer intents for communicative visualizations can be a powerful design tool. Cognitive and affective objectives are concrete and specific, which can be translated to assessments when creating, evaluating, or comparing visualization ideas. However, while there are many well-validated assessments for cognitive objectives, affective objectives are uniquely challenging. It is easy to see if a visualization helps someone remember the number of patients in a clinic, but harder to observe the change in their attitudes around donations to a crisis. In this work, we define a set of criteria for selecting assessments--from education, advocacy, economics, health, and psychology--that align with affective objectives. We illustrate the use of the framework in a complex affective design task that combines personal narratives and visualizations. Our chosen assessments allow us to evaluate different designs in the context of our objectives and competing psychological theories.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: (Left) A picture of Ruqio, a Somali woman, and her child in a hospital. Image from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) UNOCHA_2022. (Right) Data visualization of the population and location of Somalis facing food insecurity. Chart recreated, based on UN OCHA's Humanitarian Response Plan Report UNOCHA_2023.
• Figure 2: Structure for affective learning objectives in communicative visualizations with possible measures. Each cell in the table (left) provide an example objective.
• Figure 3: Examples of different scale types
• Figure 4: Our case study evaluated five affective learning objectives with five corresponding assessments for three video designs.