The Illustrated Student: Creating a Taxonomy of Imagery Derived from a First-Year Visualisation Exercise

In 2019 the University of Technology Sydney developed a research project to assess the variety of students’ state of mind in their first year. The context was implementing transition pedagogy and determining if it was possible to visually map the range of student responses to transition from high school to university. The aim was to be in a better position to anticipate transition challenges for our students. The methodology involved asking first year students across all faculties to express their experience of their first year at university in a drawing, accompanied by a Likert scale self-assessment with an optional text reflection. The data gathered comprised over 550 drawings. Further, we documented and compared a range of examples of this type of research in other institutions. We noticed images common to all the different research projects appeared. The question we asked ourselves was whether it is possible to develop a taxonomy of images which could be relied upon in subsequent iterations of the exercise. We wanted to know whether we could create categories of symbols or images which could be objectively understood. The key outcomes were despite common use of images in these projects there are challenges in creating such a taxonomy. Interpretation is subjective and a classification system might be observer constructed, and not reflect the subject’s true intention. While our own data included the Likert scale and the opportunity to add text to the response, the triangulation is only apparently helpful in determining meaning because the difficulties remained. The added information does not overcome the inherent subjectivity of interpretation. The importance of this paper is it is an admission the exercise does not establish an ability to develop a definitive taxonomy. Instead, it cautions against an attempt at a taxonomy because it risks being ultimately unfaithful to the data.