Sketching Assessment in Engineering Education: A Systematic Literature Review

This research Work In Progress systematically reviews the current literature on sketching assessment in engineering education. Sketching is an integral part of the engineering curriculum for conceptual understanding, communication, and design. Sketching enables designers to offload, view, share, and test their ideas. In addition, sketching serves as a tool to increase students' spatial reasoning skills, which is critical to retention and success in engineering. Due to its impact, sketching has been studied in a variety of ways and settings and there are a wide array of methods for assessing sketching. Researchers often assess sketching skill through expert judgment, and when actual sketches are assessed, there are many different metrics that are used. This study is a systematic literature review of sketching assessment exploring applications, cognitive dimensions, and metrics. Databases namely Engineering Village, APA PsycInfo, and Education Source were searched for finding relevant literature related to sketching assessment. Data collection criteria included papers at the high school and college level in engineering, design, architecture, and art. In this paper, our search strings and summary of the final literature sample at the abstract level in terms of publication sources, year, and reviewer decisions are presented. Future directions include continuation of content analysis at the full paper level and assigning quality rankings. The end goal of the project is to provide the design and education communities with a succinct recommendation on sketching assessment to unify efforts in sketching research across the literature.