Te Kāhui o Matariki – interpreting infographics
Infographics provide an effective format to present a variety of things in a single figure. The science capability ‘Interpret representations’ encourages students to think about how data is presented, what the representation tells us and how it gets the message across.
Visual representations have literacy components that students may need support to understand. The article Understanding infographics provides background information on how they are constructed and why they are useful communication tools.
Waitā and our marine environment
This infographic from Environment Aotearoa 2022 highlights the benefits we receive from and the pressures we place on our marine ecosystems.
Download a PDF of this infographic.
Source: Ministry for the Environment, Stats NZ and data providers and licensed by the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
In this activity, students observe and interpret infographics from the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ’s Environment Aotearoa 2022 report. The activity includes probing questions to help students understand the ways in which infographics present information.
By the end of this activity, students should be able to:
develop literacy skills for interpreting the information in an infographic
discuss the purpose of an infographic
discuss how an infographic gets the message across
discuss information they have gathered from an infographic of interest to them.
Download the Word file (see link below).
The activity Using infographics includes a simple framework for creating an infographic. Students can use this framework to create an infographic about an environmental issue of interest to them.
