Professionals Read Graphs: A Semiotic Analysis

Abstract

Graph-related practices are central to scientific endeavors and graphing has long been hailed as one of the core “general process skills” that set scientists apart. One research question that has not received much attention is, “Are scientists generally competent readers of graphs, or are graphs indissolubly tied to practices and understandings of their everyday workplace?” This study was designed to better understand the reading and interpretation of familiar and unfamiliar graphs by (mostly) scientists. From an extensive database on graphing involving university students to professionals, we selected two case studies and interpret them within a theoretical framework grounded in semiotics and hermeneutic phenomenology. The first case study provides a detailed analysis in which a scientist wrestles and in part inappropriately interprets an unfamiliar graph used in undergraduate ecology courses; the difficulties of the scientist include some of those identified among students in the graphing literature. The second case study provides an example of the transparent use of graphs in the work of a water technician who is not only familiar with her graphs, but who has an intimate, embodied knowledge of the world to which the graph refers. When it comes to reasoning, scientists are often taken as experts against which the performance of other individuals (“novices”) are judged (as inferior). If scientists’ own graphing practices are not general but tied to their embodied understanding, then the teaching of decontextualized graphing skills loses its legitimacy. Our results therefore have considerable implications to mathematics education. Professionals read graphs 2