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Qualitative, sequential, diverging

There are three types of color scale, each designed to highlight different things in a visualization.

Type Purpose
qualitative Distinguish unordered categories
sequential Show ordering
diverging Show above or below a midpoint

Here you can see the results of a survey about math anxiety from a class of students. Each question has its own row, and responses range from "Strongly Disagree" to "Neutral" to "Strongly Agree".

Choose an appropriate color scale for the plot.

Data source: Bai et al. (2009)

This exercise is part of the course

Understanding Data Visualization

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