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Abstract BackgroundSketching exists in many disciplines and varies in how it is assessed, making it challenging to define fundamental sketching skills and the characteristics of a high‐quality sketch. For instructors to apply effective strategies for teaching and assessing engineering sketching, a clear summary of the constructs, metrics, and objectives for sketching assessment across engineering education and related disciplines is needed. PurposeThis systematic literature review explores sketching assessment definitions and approaches across engineering education research. Methodology/ApproachWe collected 671 papers from five major engineering and education databases at all skill levels for reported sketching constructs and metrics, cognition, and learning contexts. Based on the selection criteria, we eliminated all but 41 papers, on which we performed content analysis. Findings/ConclusionsEngineering, design, and art emerged as three major disciplines in the papers reviewed. We found that sketching assessment most often employs metrics on accuracy, perspective, line quality, annotations, and aesthetics. Most collected studies examined beginners in undergraduate engineering design sketching or drawing ability tests. Cognitive skills included perceiving the sketch subject, creatively sketching ideas, using metacognition to monitor the sketching process, and using sketching for communication. ImplicationsSketching assessment varies by engineering discipline and relies on many types of feedback and scoring metrics. Cognitive theory can inform instructional activities as a foundation for sketching skills. There is a need for robust evidence of high‐quality assessment practices in sketching instruction. Assessment experts can apply their knowledge toward improving sketching assessment development, implementation, and validation. 

Abstract Engineering design involves intensive visual-spatial reasoning, and engineers depend upon external representation to develop concepts during idea generation. Previous research has not explored how our visual representation skills influence our idea generation effectiveness. A designer’s deficit in sketching skills could create a need for increased focus on the task of visual representation reducing cognitive resources available for the task at hand — generating concept. Further, this effect could be compounded if designers believed that their sketching skill would be evaluated or judged by their peers. This evaluation apprehension could cause additional mental workload distracting from the production of idea generation. The goal of this study is to investigate and better understand the relationship between designers’ sketching skills and idea generation abilities. In this paper, we present preliminary results of the relationship between independent measures of sketching skill and idea generation ability from an entry-level engineering design and graphics course. During data collection, task instructions were given in two ways to independent groups: one group was instructed upfront that sketching would be evaluated, while the second group was kept blind to the sketch evaluation. In this paper, we also examine the potential priming effects of sketch quality evaluation apprehension on idea generation productivity. The results show that sketching quality and idea quantity are largely independent, and that the priming effects of sketch evaluation instructions are small to negligible on idea generation productivity. 

Perspective sketching is a skill that is required for a variety of jobs including, but not limited to, architectural design, graphic design, and engineering. Sketching however, is a difficult skill to grasp for people early and can take a while to learn. Recently, there have been many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) designed to help improve people’s drawing skills. The feedback system for the perspective drawing lessons in SketchTivity, one such ITS, is currently limited to smoothness, speed, and accuracy of the lines. Our team plans to improve upon this feedback system so that the feedback provided to a user is now more nuanced as well as more actionable to reaffirm future learning. To evaluate our system we will conduct a user study with 40 students that involves going through several sketching lessons and then sketching a street corner in 2-D perspective. We plan to run a between-subjects user study with our participants to determine if our adjustment has any effect on the improvement of sketching skills and the usability of the application. We hope to determine that providing the user with data for their smoothness, speed, and accuracy after four sketching prompts can cause an overall improvement in the students’ scores in comparison to at the end of their sketching session. The algorithm that we created to identify a student’s potential issue we hope will be able to provide accurate, actionable feedback in most situations. The visual alterations we made to SketchTivity we expect to have a positive impact on the perspective feedback system and alter the students sketching performance. In future iterations the algorithm should be further refined and the data collected from the students sketches should be further developed to provide more data to create more actionable recommendations for improved sketching performance and retention. 

Sketching skills are developed over time through practice, requiring students to stay motivated to continue improving. Gamification has been shown to be helpful in keeping users motivated, so this work seeks to investigate the impact of gamification on the user’s motivation to practice sketching skills in the intelligent tutoring system, SketchTivity. Specifically, this work will evaluate the impact of gamified elements including achievement banners, star ratings, and performance statistics to give users feedback about their level of success after a sketching lesson. This concept will be explored through within subjects focus group testing where participants will interact with each version of the interface, describe their experiences in a think-aloud fashion, and discuss their preferences in a post-interview. The motivational impact of the gamified elements will be synthesized through thematic analysis of the think-aloud comments and interview data as well as statistical analysis of performance differences in terms of SketchTivity’s sketch quality metrics. 

This Research Work-In-Progress reports the implementation of an Object Assembly Test for sketching skills in an undergraduate mechanical engineering graphics course. Sketching is essential for generating and refining ideas, and for communication among team members. Design thinking is supported through sketching as a means of translating between internal and external representations, and creating shared representations of collaborative thinking. While many spatial tests exist in engineering education, these tests have not directly used sketching or tested sketching skill. The Object Assembly Test is used to evaluate sketching skills on 3-dimensional mental imagery and mental rotation tasks in 1- and 2-point perspective. We describe revisions to the Object Assembly Test skills and grading rubric since its pilot test, and implement the test in an undergraduate mechanical engineering course for further validation. We summarize inter-rater reliability for each sketching exercise and for each grading metric for a sample of sketches, with discussion of score use and interpretation. 

This Research Work In Progress Paper examines empirical evidence on the impacts of feedback from an intelligent tutoring software on sketching skill development. Sketching is a vital skill for engineering design, but sketching is only taught limitedly in engineering education. Teaching sketching usually involves one-on-one feedback which limits its application in large classrooms. To meet the demands of feedback for sketching instruction, SketchTivity was developed as an intelligent tutoring software. SketchTivity provides immediate personalized feedback on sketching freehand practice. The current study examines the effectiveness of the feedback of SketchTivity by comparing students practicing with the feedback and without. Students were evaluated on their motivation for practicing sketching, the development of their skills, and their perceptions of the software. This work in progress paper examines preliminary analysis in all three of these areas.