Leveraging Domain Practices to Improve Academic Literacy in Undergraduate Computing Students

Undergraduate students often find the process of collating research results and producing structured written text from this difficult. Research suggests that those with a writing strategy and those who leverage visual modelling techniques to structure their research or writing had an advantage over those who did not. There are strong parallels here with the field of software engineering in terms of established processes and the use of visual models. We hypothesise that undergraduate computing students will adopt Mind Maps (a visual modelling technique) as a tool in their writing process. To explore this, we conducted first a survey to better understand students' attitudes towards academic research and also a practical intervention, involving mind-mapping their research proposals prior to writing their literature reviews and full research proposal.Our investigation indicates that mind maps can serve as effective intermediary tools for organizing concepts and structuring academic writing, with parallels observed between their use and formal modeling methods such as UML diagrams. Survey and intervention data demonstrated that students who engaged in mind-mapping prior to drafting research proposals exhibited measurable improvements in literature density and overall proposal quality, though participation was voluntary and potentially biased toward more motivated students. Nevertheless, because improvements were assessed against individual baselines rather than cohort-wide performance, the results substantiate the pedagogical value of mind mapping as a research-support strategy.