Using Digital Map Tools to Assist Learning of Argumentative Essay Writing

In this paper, we design and implement a system that uses a digital map system to assist the learning of argumentative essay with Argument map and Concept map. The system had experimented in a primary school with 346 students for 20 weeks that is a whole semester with three groups: Argument Map, Concept Map, and conventional method. The contribution of this study is to improve the quality of student’s essay writing by using the advantage of Argument Map. This study compares the effectiveness of the arguments in the essay writing based on the use of different argumentation strategies such as traditional writing, Concept Map writing, and Argumentative Map writing. The experiment results show that Argument Map group is the most significantly improving among the three groups. The analysis results on the improvement on three dimensions of argumentation: (1) claim, reason, and evidence, (2) arguments on supporting the claim and on refuting opposition claim, and (3) completeness and coherence are also reported in the paper.