Engineering “reasoning diagrams”: A new tool for visualizing engineering reasoning to improve engineering communication instruction

Learning to communicate effectively as an emerging professional poses many challenges to engineering students, as they must learn not only to understand the relationships between complex processes, concepts, and research and design methods, but also to understand how to compose for many different rhetorical situations, genres, audiences, and purposes. To help students understand the relationship between disciplinary reasoning, genre, and audience, we constructed what we term a “reasoning diagram” - a map that coordinates the knowledge domains of disciplinary content, field-specific rhetorical patterns of argumentation and arrangement, and genre conventions. This reasoning diagram was at the heart of an online instructional module teaching students to write a journal article from laboratory research in Materials Science and Engineering. Assessment data of online and live instruction using the reasoning diagram shows that this method of visually mapping professional communication, combined with instruction on the rhetorical moves of a professional genre, can increase the students´ ability to understand how to communicate complex disciplinary knowledge, substantially improve students´ ability to make appropriate rhetorical choices, and can help students develop their composing processes and scholarly habits of mind.