Visualization Literacy in United States Classrooms: A Qualitative Analysis of State Standards for K–12 Education Policy

Abstract

Visualization literacy—the ability to interpret, reason about, and communicate information through visual representations of data—plays a critical role in decision-making, civic participation, and STEM learning. Prior research has primarily examined it through assessment frameworks, educational interventions and materials, and studies of public understanding, but comparatively little is known about how these skills are formally introduced throughout primary and secondary education (K–12) in the United States. State learning standards describe the knowledge and skills students are expected to acquire across grades and subjects, offering a unique perspective into educational expectations surrounding visualization literacy. We compiled STEM education standards from all 50 U.S. states and extracted 4,872 visualization-related standards from a representative subset of 20, each coded by visualization task, idiom, representation mode, grade level, and subject. Preliminary findings show instruction progresses from concrete representations and retrieval-based tasks toward more abstract forms and analytical reasoning. This work contributes a large-scale corpus of policy-derived visualization literacy standards and a foundation for connecting visualization literacy theory with formal educational practice.