CALVI: Critical Thinking Assessment for Literacy in Visualizations

Visualization misinformation is a prevalent problem, and combating it requires understanding people’s ability to read, interpret, and reason about erroneous or potentially misleading visualizations, which lacks a reliable measurement: existing visualization literacy tests focus on well-formed visualizations. We systematically develop an assessment for this ability by: (1) developing a precise definition of misleaders (decisions made in the construction of visualizations that can lead to conclusions not supported by the data), (2) constructing initial test items using a design space of misleaders and chart types, (3) trying out the provisional test on 497 participants, and (4) analyzing the test tryout results and refining the items using Item Response Theory, qualitative analysis, a wrong-due-to-misleader score, and the content validity index. Our final bank of 45 items shows high reliability, and we provide item bank usage recommendations for future tests and different use cases. Related materials are available at: https://osf.io/pv67z/.