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Pedagogic Applications of Argument Maps to Enhance Critical Thinking: Thought Seeds, Argument Mapping, Collaborative Mapping

Paper · 2026 · Sruti Narra

Summary

The paper tackles how to keep critical thinking central in higher education as generative AI tools spread and risk replacing skills students should build themselves. It borrows argument mapping, a representation well known in NLP for training LLMs to analyse and produce arguments, and turns it into classroom practice. The author proposes three progressively demanding activities:

  • using published argument maps as open-ended "thought seeds" for discussion,
  • having individual students map arguments by hand to plan a thesis,
  • having groups build argument maps together during company-driven projects.

The tasks were run in bachelor's and master's courses in International Business at Häme University of Applied Sciences (HAMK), Finland. The evidence comes from teacher observations, in-class comments and voluntary open-ended surveys, not controlled measurement. Students reported that mapping gave them a high-level view of their research, helped them structure their theses and supported group problem solving. The author argues that such maps are hard to produce with a single AI prompt, so they can show students' actual reasoning and support more reliable, process-focused assessment.

Key points

  • Three tasks:
    • Argument maps as thought seeds, discussed without the facilitator correcting answers.
    • Individual argument mapping for critical reflection.
    • Collaborative argument mapping (CAM).
  • Thesis-planning course: Mapping was the first assignment in a compulsory academic writing course in HAMK's Master's in Sustainable Business programme. Students were deliberately free to depart from formal mapping conventions, which produced very different map formats.
  • Group projects: Collaborative mapping was used in "business laboratories," where student teams applied design thinking to real company challenges. Maps were drawn on paper in face-to-face sessions and on Miro boards online. Use of ChatGPT and Copilot was allowed, provided students checked the credibility of the information.
  • Limitations: No quantitative results are given. All testing took place in one department at one institution. Mapping has a learning curve, so students need support materials, examples and feedback.
  • Materials: The task materials are on GitHub (Sruti-Narra/Argument-Mapping-Tasks-for-Research-and-Project-Courses). The paper appears in TeachNLP 2026, pp. 7–10.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Häme University of Applied Sciences.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Social Sciences · 1,772 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 worksEducation · 203 works

Cite

Cite as Sruti Narra. 2026. Pedagogic Applications of Argument Maps to Enhance Critical Thinking: Thought Seeds, Argument Mapping, Collaborative Mapping. Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.2

@inproceedings{narra2026pedagogic,
  title = {{Pedagogic Applications of Argument Maps to Enhance Critical Thinking: Thought Seeds, Argument Mapping, Collaborative Mapping}},
  author = {Sruti Narra},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.2},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.teachingnlp-1.2}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. AIFdb Consortium. 2014. AIFdb Corpora. Argument Interchange Format Database. find
  2. Daniel Chang, Michael Pin-Chuan Lin, and Gwo-Jen Hwang. 2025. Charting the field: a review of argument visualization research for writing, learning, and reasoning. Frontiers in Education, 10. Article 1672105. find
  3. Darmawansah, Dzul Rachman, and Febiyani Febiyani. 2024a. Collaborative argument map-based ChatGPT to enhance EFL students’ argumentation complexity and group efficacy. Taiwan International ESP Journal, 15(2). find
  4. Darmawansah, Dzul Rachman, Febiyani Febiyani, and Gwo-Jen Hwang. 2024b. ChatGPT-supported collaborative argumentation: Integrating collaboration script and argument mapping to enhance EFL students’ argumentation skills. Education and Information Technologies, 30(3):3803–3827. find
  5. Shree. Deepa. 2022. Thought seeds in anthrogogic learning contexts. Journal of Indian Education, 48(2):58–70. find
  6. Thierry Herman. 2025. Argument mapping: Towards an interdisciplinary descriptive model. Argumentation et Analyse du Discours, (34). find
  7. John Lawrence and Chris Reed. 2014. AIFdb Corpora. Argument Interchange Format Database. find
  8. John C. Nesbit and Qing Liu. 2025. Argument mapping in higher education: A Systematic Review. Higher Education Quarterly. Advance online publication. find
  9. Fan Ouyang, Lin Zheng, and Shi Zheng. 2024. Empowering collaborative knowledge construction through the implementation of a collaborative argument map tool. The Internet and Higher Education, 62. Article 100946. find

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