A Systematic Review of Empirical Research on Graphing Numerical Data in K-12 STEM Education

TL;DR

This systematic review synthesizes 50 empirical studies on how K-12 students learn to construct and interpret graphs in STEM education, highlighting benefits and common difficulties encountered.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of research on graphing skills in K-12 STEM, identifying effective instructional approaches and persistent student challenges.

Findings

Graphing instruction improves construction and interpretation skills.

Students face various difficulties in both creating and understanding graphs.

Empirical evidence supports the benefits of teaching graphing in STEM education.

Abstract

Graphs are essential representations in the professions and education concerning the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Beyond their academic relevance, graphs find extensive utility in everyday scenarios, ranging from news media to educational materials. This underscores the importance of people's being able to understand graphs. However, the ability to understand graphs is connected to the ability to create graphs. Therefore, in school education, particularly in STEM subjects, not only the understanding but also the skill of constructing graphs from numerical data is emphasized. Although constructing graphs is a skill that most people do not require in their everyday lives and professions, it is a well-established student activity that has been empirically studied several times. Therefore, since a synthesis of the research findings on this topic has not yet been conducted, a summary of the studies investigating graphing via various viewpoints and differing methods could be a valuable contribution. To provide an overview of the empirical literature on this important topic, our systematic review identifies how the construction of convention-based graphical representations of numerical data, referred to as graphing, has been studied in previous research, how effective graphing is, and which types of difficulties are encountered by students. Based on these aspects, we defined inclusion criteria that led to 50 peer-reviewed empirical studies on graphing in K-12 STEM education found in SCOPUS, ERIC, and PsychInfo. Graphing instruction seemed to be beneficial for student learning, not only improving graph construction but also graph interpretation skills. However, the students experienced various difficulties during graphing, both during graph construction and the interpretation and usage of data.