Constructing Meaning, Not Just Charts: A Cognitive–Instructional Framework for Generative AI Usage in Visualisation Education

Abstract

Infographics and data visualisations have become the primary mode for organising, teaching, and assessing complex information, and a substantial body of work establishes why they support learning. Generative AI now allows learners to produce sophisticated visualisations from natural-language prompts, removing technical barriers but introducing a pedagogical tension: when an AI system performs the analytic and encoding work, learners can obtain competent outputs without engaging the reasoning that makes visual artefacts educational. We argue that this is not only a question of instructional efficiency but of learner agency, of whether the human remains the author of meaning, and therefore a question of dignity in the teaching-learning process. Synthesising two systematic reviews, one spanning information design and the learning sciences and one covering Generative AI in visualisation education, we develop a unified conceptual framework. The second review yields a classification of AI visualisation systems by pedagogical orientation, in which systems that engage learners in reasoning are supported by stronger evidence of learning outcomes than those that deliver finished artefacts. The framework reconceptualises infographics and data visualisations as cognitive–instructional systems whose educational value resides in their construction, across an interlinked process of thinking, learning, and communication, and crosses this process with a set of learner-centred design layers. An agency principle organises the framework, distinguishing tools that scaffold the learner's cognitive work from those that substitute for it, operationalised through transparency, invitation, and the progressive fading of support. We close with design implications and a research agenda foregrounding the needs of linguistically diverse and under-resourced learners, and the measurement of transferable visualisation literacy.