A framework for visualizing research data

摘要

At significant time and expense, researchers produce findings that could have broad implications in their field of learning. In education, health care, and public policy, research unveils new interventions, experiments, or discoveries that have the potential to improve people's lives. Yet researchers often encounter several basic roadblocks related to the issue of “knowledge transfer” that prevent them from maximizing the influence of their work: 1) their findings are delivered through journal articles and static black-and-white tables that take effort for policy-makers to find and interpret; and 2) important research languishes for considerable time - often years - before it can successfully navigate the publishing process and reach its intended audience. This paper proposes an alternative framework for knowledge transfer that leverages online data visualization tools in order to make research findings immediately available and compelling to the broader public. Using research data from the education policy field, we produce shareable interactive visualizations in Tableau and compare them to more static and tabular representations of the same data. We illustrate how our process helps surface trends in the data that would otherwise remain hidden and enables users to engage with the most salient information. We further explain how our process could be generalized to help a wide variety of research data become more accessible and interpretable for a wider audience for little to no cost.