The goal of this assignment is to help students engage more meaningfully with data and practice turning abstract numbers and cold facts into graphic and visual representations that rhetorically engage the viewer. I provide a resource page with a sample of a well-constructed (for a student) infographic along with suggestions for data sources--students are required to select both their sources and relevant facts from established data sources. They then must display these facts in graphic charts accompanied by minimal explanatory text. They must demonstrate that they can discriminate what is important and useful information among the large quantity contained in the reports they discover, and that they can arrange and assemble those facts so to present a unified narrative. I suggest they use Piktochart, a fairly intuitive infographic design website, but I do not limit the students from using other graphic design options.
One of the strengths of the infographic assignment is its flexibility and adaptability. Depending on the students' abilities and the course's outcomes, this assignment could be used either as a summative assessment to replace a research paper or as a preparatory exercise leading up to a research paper. It is also possible to use it as an alternate version of an annotated bibliography, if the facts are grouped together by their source rather than by their shared topics or ideas--an infoliographic, as I call it. You can see a rubric for evaluating this version of the infographic assignment by clicking here.
One of the strengths of the infographic assignment is its flexibility and adaptability. Depending on the students' abilities and the course's outcomes, this assignment could be used either as a summative assessment to replace a research paper or as a preparatory exercise leading up to a research paper. It is also possible to use it as an alternate version of an annotated bibliography, if the facts are grouped together by their source rather than by their shared topics or ideas--an infoliographic, as I call it. You can see a rubric for evaluating this version of the infographic assignment by clicking here.