A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This week’s post is about “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” (henceforth APTOVM), a resource that details and categorizes the many ways of presenting information visually.  I’m Damian, a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory.

Here at the Graduate Teaching Center we believe that one of the foundational skills of successful teaching is understanding how people learn and teaching accordingly.  There are several inventories that conceptualize the ways in which people learn (see Coffield, F., D. Moseley, et al. (2004) for an overview of learning-style inventories); one particular inventory that APTOVM directly speaks to is VARK.  The VARK inventory posits that information can be presented in Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic modalities, and that different people have different ways (or combinations of ways) in which they prefer to take in (or give out) information.  As teachers, then, we can strive to find modes of presentation that that best suit both the material and our students’ learning preferences

The Visual preference “includes the depiction of information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, which instructors use to represent what could have been presented in words.  It could have been called Graphic as that better explains what it covers” (from www.vark-learn.com; visit to learn more about VARK!).  APTOVM can help us both devise ways to present information visually and concoct activities/assignments that give students the opportunity to interface with information visually.  The table groups methods into data-, information-, concept-, strategy-, metaphor-, and compound-visualization categories; it also labels whether each method depicts structure or processes, details or an overview, and divergent or convergent thinking.

While we might initially associate the visual presentation of information with quantitative fields (graphs, charts, and the like), APTOVM demonstrates how visualization methods can be applied in any class.  Some ways that I’ve used visualization methods in my own teaching have been:

• having students produce their own decision-tree algorithm of how to harmonize a simple melody
• diagramming sonata forms’ thematic-material and harmonic relationships with boxes at the blackboard

I hope you have fun exploring the table, and would love to read in the comments about the ways you use visualization methods in your own teaching!