Supporting Students’ Research Writing in Psychology through Argument Diagramming

Arguing for the need for a scientific research study (i.e. writing an introduction to a research paper) poses significant challenges for students. When faced with these challenges, students often generate overly ‘safe’ studies, or replications, or in contrast include no strong support for their hypothesis. Additionally, instruction on argumentation has been slow to integrate into scientific education and discourse. This raises the question—how can we support novice scientists in generating and defending high quality hypotheses? A long history of research supports the affordances provided by spatial representations of complex information, particularly in the sciences. More recently, argument diagramming— the process of spatially representing an argument by its component parts and their relationships— has gained traction in instruction for philosophy, social studies, and law. However, its effectiveness for supporting students in science is relatively untested. Additionally, many of these studies have focused on basic contrasts between diagramming and no diagramming. The purpose of these studies was to test the effectiveness of argument diagrams for supporting students’ resea