Infographic Project: How It Went

Back in August, before the semester started, I blogged about the possibility of assigning an Infographic Project for my Chemistry & Society class. I’m pleased to say that I decided to try this, and today’s post is my reflection on how things went. (When I get back my teaching evaluations we’ll see if the students had any additional comments.)

On the first day of class, I spent five minutes in class introducing the Infographic Project and told students not to worry about it just yet. (There was a brief overview in my syllabus.) Just before the midpoint of the semester, students were given the details of the assignment including a rubric. In the previous class meeting we had discussed the properties of water and aqueous solutions. In the first half of the subsequent class meeting, we discussed chapter 8 from Bottled and Sold (by Peter Gleick), “Selling Bottled Water: The Modern Medicine Show” that discusses the case of Penta Water in great detail. Besides reading the chapter beforehand, I also had the students watch this video from AcquaPhi. I didn’t tell them anything about it beforehand. Our class discussion was very lively, with great participation from all the students. There were several of those great aha moments! (A few students thought I wouldn't assign them a pseudoscientific video and thought that it was "real", but strange.)

Based on the great discussion we had, I proposed that the theme of the infographic be about any product that had something to do with water. (We had a great discussion about float therapy early in the semester tied to a unit on the scientific method and calculating density.) Students liked the idea! Over the second half of the semester I would periodically show an infographic in class that was relevant to what we would discuss that day. As we went through acid-base chemistry, redox chemistry, and moved into organic chemistry (and natural products), I would hint at other possible topics. I would also take 2-3 minutes in class to answer a student question about the parameters of the project.

The infographics were due this past Sunday. Students were allowed to work in groups of up to three people. Interestingly, not many students formed trios, and they were mostly solo efforts or pairs. (If students worked with someone else, they had to each send me a separate e-mail about their contribution to the project with the submission.) The Thursday leading up to the deadline, I decided that we would not meet as a class but students could come by my office to show me drafts of their infographics. This turned out to be a good decision. Around 40% of the class showed me initial drafts. In some cases I saw multiple drafts before the final product. Hence, the average quality of the final submissions was good across the board. I’m also very pleased that students who e-mailed me drafts all of last week did so no later than Friday afternoon. No one sent me a draft over the weekend asking me for feedback. (I’ve trained my students well!) So I was able to come in on Monday morning and see all the submissions. Many of the students did not wait until the last minute. I had final submissions starting as early as Thursday afternoon.

I decided that peer review of the infographics would involve each student rating three other submissions. It took me a while to devise a scheme so that students would not review an infographic that was closely related to their own project. Hence I was pleased that the students chose a wide range of topics. (I think my giving many examples throughout the semester helped!) Topics included water in physical therapy, vitamin water, alkaline water, a variety of bottled waters, several different energy drinks, water-filtering systems (e.g. Brita), large-scale water treatment processes, and a range of cosmetics (lotions, creams, water masks).

As part of peer review, students rated on a numerical scale the clarity, depth and usefulness of the content, and the aesthetics of the presentation: fonts, colors, relevance and quality of graphics, layout. Then they had to list two further questions they would ask the creator of the infographic, and reflect on how they would have made their own infographic better now that they had looked closely at three others. While some of the students posed superficial questions (partly correlated with how fast they completed the assignment), the majority posed thoughtful questions – and I was very glad to see that they were starting to incorporate scientific inquiry in their thinking!

One of the things I had worried about was whether students would try to plagiarize other infographics on the web. I did some searches on the topics students chose, but saw nothing egregious. It did make me think that perhaps a future assignment might be for students find some infographics on the Internet and critically evaluate them for content and presentation.

Overall, I’m happy with my experiment and I might do something like this again in a future class. I did make a slide show of all the submitted infographics and I showed them in class (with 20-second highlights for each slide by me) before the students did their detailed ratings of the three they were assigned. This was to give them a sense of the range. I also uploaded the slide show to my course website and asked students to e-mail me (by next Tuesday) the infographic they would rate the best overall and the infographic they personally found the most interesting. I have responses from half the class so far and there are some winners emerging. I told the students that the top ones will be used as examples in my next class.

Now that you’ve just read a wall of text, it seems appropriate to end this post with an Infographic. Sorry, I won't be showing you any from my class since the semester isn't over yet. (Finals week is next week, and I'm still grading the infographic assignment.) This month I’m enjoying the Compound Interest Advent series. Here is yesterday’s (Day 10) – informative and highly amusing!