First-year undergraduate students with poor visual literacy skills have difficulty extracting core concepts from visualizations, instead focusing on superficial features. Because they have no guidance on how to interpret visualizations, they interpret them in different ways depending on the individual’s prior knowledge. This creates two problems for educators: the lesson students take away from visual learning materials is inconsistent between individuals; and misconceptions learned from incorrectly interpreting visualizations affects the way they understand concepts that they learn later.

There is a need for a resource that teaches students how to extract relevant information from visualizations. One particular topic in which students consistently misinterpret visuals is subcellular scale. Using subcellular scale as a case study, these animations teach students about the purposes and limitations of different types of representations so that they learn to think more critically about visualizations.