Plotting results having only mean and standard deviation I am trying to visualize an appropriate plot for the observations in this table of means and standard deviations of recall scores:
\begin{array} {c|c c|c c|}
& \text{Control} & & \text{Experimental} &  \\
& \text{Mean} & \text{SD} &\text{Mean} &\text{SD} \\
\hline
\text{Recall} & 37 & 8 & 21 & 6 \\
\hline
\end{array}
What is is the best way to do that? Is bar chart a good way to do it? How can I illustrate the standard deviation in that case?
 A: I'd suggest a dot plot:

Although there is still some room for improvement (perhaps dimming the edges of the big rectangle surrounding the data), almost all of the ink is being used to display information.
A: Standard deviation on bar graphs can be illustrated by including error bars in them.
The visualization(source) below is an example of such visualization:


From a discussion in the comments below, having only the error whiskers instead of the error bars setup seems a better way to visualize such data. So, the graph can look somewhat like this:

A: Perhaps the best way to visualise the kind of data that gives rise to those sorts of results is to simulate a data set of a few hundred or a few thousand data points where one variable (control) has mean 37 and standard deviation 8 while the other (experimental) has men 21 and standard deviation 6.  The simulation is simple enough in a spreadsheet or your favourite stats package.  You can then graph the two distribitions to get an impression of the extent that the two sets of recall scores vary.

With a simuated data-set you can also easily construct summary graphs like box-plots or histograms with error bars. 
