Reading Graphs Showing Beliefs.

  A friend sent me this link to an article in Popular Science on vaccines and various countries confidence in the use of them.  I've seen these types of graphs before but I've never taken time to have students learn to read them.

The first three graphs show a map of the world with each country colored based on the percentage who believed in the topic.

One map explored which countries believe that vaccines are important, another explored the same countries belief vaccines are effective and the last the question of safety.  Many countries scored low on all three graphs where the lowest percentage marked is 65 percent.  The easiest graph to read is a Quadrant I grid based on the belief vaccines are important vs effective at the bottom

The y-axis runs from 60% to 100% on the question of important while the x-axis runs from 12.5% to 100 percent on the question of effectiveness.  The key at the bottom shows a specific color for geographic location while the individual countries are shown on the graph itself with the color based on their region.

This graph gives students a chance to apply the coordinate system for each country.  If the coordinate is (effectiveness, important), then Peru is (70, 94) while Japan is (61, 67).  Finding the coordinate for each country should be fairly easy but when it comes to interpreting what these coordinates mean, many students will struggle because it is asking them to communicate meaning.

One way to interpret the data would be to say that in Peru they believe more in a vaccine's importance than its effectiveness while Japan doesn't have as strong a belief in it's importance or effectiveness.  In addition, students can create a line of best fit for all the data and they can interpret the trends of geographic regions belief of importance vs effectiveness.

You might ask questions such as
1.  Why might Ethiopia believe that vaccines are both important and effective while Belarus doesn't have a strong belief on vaccines?

2.  Is there a trend in the regions whose beliefs range from vaccines are neither important or effective to are both important and effective?

3.  Why might a country feel the vaccines are important but not effective?

4.  Why might a country feel vaccines are not particularly important but effective.

Questions do not have to use numerical answers.  They might ask students to interpret the data and communicate those ideas.  Their conclusions may not be as neat and tidy as found in the textbook because this is real life data, not something developed to fit a specific topic in the book.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.