Towards data storytelling to support teaching and learning

Data science is now impacting the educational sector, with a growing number of commercial products and research prototypes providing learning dashboards as feedback for both educators and students. From a human-centred computing perspective, the end-user's interpretation of these visualisations is a critical challenge to design for, with empirical evidence already showing that 'usable' visualisations are not necessarily effective from a teaching and learning perspective. Since an educator's interpretation of visualised data is essentially the construction of a narrative about that student's progress, we draw on the growing body of work on 'Data Storytelling' (DS) as the inspiration for a set of enhancements that could be applied to data visualisations to improve their communicative power. We present a pilot study that explores the effectiveness of these DS elements based on educators' responses to paper prototypes. The dual purpose is understanding the contribution of each visual element for data storytelling, and the effectiveness of the enhancements when combined. The results suggest that DS elements could add clarity, especially when there are multiple possible stories in a complex visualisation.