Towards a community of practice for an informed citizenry: Secondary students' sense-making of graphs related to climate change

Although graphs are used to communicate much of the science-based issues that impact our society (e.g., climate change), citizens often do not make sense of them as intended. To help people become members in a community of competent outsiders, this qualitative study investigates how my participants made sense of three graphs depicting phenomena related to climate change (Keeling, Temperature, and Arctic). The analysis of my participants’ interview transcripts and sketches showed that their sense-making of these graphs could be characterized by one of four approaches (figurative, literal, analytic, and analytic+) with respect to the graphing practices (interpret and analyze, explain, predict, and generalize) and set of crosscutting strategies (stories about how phenomena occur, mathematical strategies, and perceptions of graph sources and uses). The general framework for the graphical sense-making of these three graphs can be used to inform curriculum development, classroom instruction, and assessment design of concepts and practices related to those graphs.