A quasi-experiment to estimate the effects of using interactive graphs by students on peer ratings of the presentations is designed.
The idea of utilizing interactive graphs started with Gapminder. Gapminder is a data visualization tool that allows, by introducing animations, the building of "interactive graphs" that can show how selected economic variables of interest vary over time or over some other selected variable (e.g. country, gender, etc.). Gapminder seemed to be an innovative, engaging and effective way to present and interpret economic data used by the author in classes, with much positive feedback.
The hypotheses was that interactive graphs can be a powerful teaching tool to enhance the understanding of visual learners as well as adding one more dimension to otherwise 2-dimensional traditional graphs. This would make it easier for students to see the big picture in macroeconomics.
In an Intermediate Macroeconomics course taught in the Fall of 2014, 50 students were required to use traditional, non-interactive, 2-dimensional graphs for their presentations. In the following term, Spring of 2015, the same course was taught in exactly the same way but required 78 students to use interactive graphs in their presentations. The results of this experiment is presented in this paper. The main findings are that the use of interactive graphs do not seem to make a difference in student’s understanding. Although regarded as helpful by a majority of students, such graphics do not seem to play a critical role in their learning.