The science capability ‘Interpret representations’ encourages students to think about how data1 is presented, what the representation tells us and how it gets the message across. Visual representations contain literacy and numeracy components that students may need support to understand.
New Zealand’s annual temperature is rising
This graph shows the temperatures from decade to decade and year to year.
Graph by Ministry for the Environment, Stats NZ, and data providers and released under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
In this activity, students observe and interpret graphs from the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ’s Our atmosphere and climate 2020 report. The activity includes discussion questions to help students understand the ways in which the representations present information.
By the end of this activity, students should be able to:
- develop literacy and numeracy skills for interpreting information from graphs
- identify the components of a graph
- discuss the purpose of the graph.
Download the Word file (see link below).
Related content
The article Our atmosphere and climate – introduction has links to resources that inform students (and the general public) about the state of New Zealand’s climate2.
The climate change topic curates all Hub resources. Use the filters at the top of the page to find specific resources.
The ClimateViz citizen science3 project needs help interpreting climate change4 graphics to help combat misinformation5 and support scientific communication.
Related activities
Using infographics challenges students to delve into infographics and how they present science information.
Using weather data challenges students to use long-term weather6 datasets to create and interpret graphs.
Climate data analysis challenges students to work with long-term weather data using Data Studio.
Acknowledgement
This resource has been produced with the support of the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ. (c) Crown Copyright.
Our atmosphere and climate 2020
The Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ produce New Zealand’s Environmental Reporting Series. Our atmosphere and climate 2020 focuses on climate change, with an overview of what is happening to our climate and how this affects many of the things we care about.
- data: The unprocessed information we analyse to gain knowledge.
- climate: The weather conditions of an area averaged over a series of years, usually 30 or more.
- citizen science: Citizen volunteers participate in scientific projects and work in partnership with scientists to answer scientific questions.
- climate change: The large-scale, long-term increase in the Earth’s average temperatures, with associated changes in weather patterns. There is significant scientific evidence that warming is due to increased quantities of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, with most of the rise due to human activity.
- misinformation: Information that is wrong, but it is not shared in print or online media with the intent to hurt someone or something.
- weather: Daily or short-term conditions like temperature, cloud cover, precipitation and wind affecting a certain area.
