Structured drawing tasks support research ideation

Visualizing Arguments to Scaffold Graduate Writing in Engineering Education

“…Our research and intervention extends from an explicit need: to shift engineering education graduate students from a writing framework to a rhetoric framework. The literature illustrates this need by noting : 1) that undergraduate engineering writing is often (though not always) approached through an a-rhetorical framework [6][7][8][9][10], 2) that crafting arguments (rhetoric) demands different skills than simply writing correct sentences [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], and 3) that in engineering education, communication has been acknowledged as an important skill but few scholars have clearly differentiated between the development of writing skills and argumentation skills [18][19][20][21][22].…”

“…To meet the challenge of representing abstract ideas, some research has advocated for the use of mind maps in aiding students in constructing writing. While mind maps can be a useful tool in keeping track of complex writing projects and for getting started with a writing project [20], they do not necessarily have an argument ingrained within them, and are different from the tool of a visual page form which illustrates the rhetoric of a text through shapes [21], [22].…”