Graphical representations and transfer of ideas between multi-draft pre-writing stages

Abstract

In this study, 36 engineering students who were taking a course on effective communication used graphic organizers to prepare their draft for a writing task. This was followed by a review by peers and the teacher. As students often have difficulties constructing knowledge across representations, this study aims to uncover the factors that influence students’ cognitive decision-making when transferring information between pre-writing stages. The findings show that the factors were: the level of elaboration of the main ideas, the link between the writing goal of each pre-writing stage, and the level of importance of the main ideas. Furthermore, the redundant information in the pre-writing stages helped rather than hindered them from transferring ideas between the pre-writing stages. In addition, the students were more ready to accept feedback from the teacher than their peers. These findings highlight the importance of factoring in the function of the information in the representations in instructional design using multiple representations.