Comprehension of Graphs and Tables Depend on the Task: Empirical Evidence from Two Web-Based Studies
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Graphs and tables are an effective means of communication. However, relatively little experimental work exists examining differences between various formats in how well people understand provided information. We conducted two web-based experiments with a large, diverse sample to explore the effects of display format on respondents ’ comprehension. We found that comprehension depended on task. Graphs were better for estimating differences; however, tables were better when estimating equality and sums. We found 3D display formats reduced comprehension of pie charts but not of bar charts. Although pie charts never assisted comprehension, they often did not significantly impair comprehension either. Comprehension based on a 3-way table was as good as that for clustered bar charts but was worse for divided bar charts. Information can be conveyed graphically even with 3-way tables, but the choice of display format needs to be sensitive to the task at hand.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it