Visualizing Arguments to Scaffold Graduate Writing in Engineering Education

Many graduate students come to engineering education research with technical backgrounds in engineering. This can present a challenge for them in learning to write social science research, with new expectations around the structure of academic arguments for the field of engineering education research. Existing research suggests that even graduate students familiar with writing strategies struggle when entering new communities of practice and disciplines. Although some scholarship has focused on writing, minimal strategies for encouraging argumentation through a rhetorical approach have been developed for graduate students. Unlike a focus on written product, which privileges sentence-level concerns, a focus on rhetoric functions on a more abstract level, helping students to understand the structure and purpose of arguments as part of the writing process. Our research addresses the struggle many graduate students in engineering education experience as they work to develop rhetorical argumentation skills and presents a rhetorical approach to supporting graduate student writing that focuses on visualizing arguments using page forms. This paper provides both the foundational theories required to understand a visual rhetoric approach, and preliminary data that suggests its impact on graduate students in a doctoral-level engineering education program.