these plans with their supervisors and the course
lecturer, and substantially modify them. Finally,
every student prepares two or three drafts of his/her
thesis paper, following the plan developed before. By
teaching this course, the department closely monitors
students’ progress at an early stage of thesis writing.
Further work is managed by student supervisors
alone. The department staff then check the final
versions of the theses. Our paper describes the
method and course structure, and also presents some
evaluation data.
2 RELATED WORK
There are a large number of books and papers on
academic writing, e.g. (Annesley, 2010), (Swales,
Feak, 2004), (Canagarajah, 2013). In (Stojmenovic,
2010) specific guidelines for writing papers on
software engineering and computer science are
presented.
There exists significant literature on development
software documentation: see (Barker, 2002) for
survey tools and methods. There is also a variety of
approaches to writing user documentation (Weiss,
1991) and a vast literature on technical writing
(Williams, 2000), (Wright, 2010).
However, academic and technical writing courses
can help students in preparing their thesis papers only
when their general writing skills are already high
enough, which, in fact, does not prove to be the case
even after taking these courses (LaCourse, Rock,
2002). Hence a special form of thesis development
support is required.
There are a number approaches, techniques, and
tools to support thesis development.
The problem of interaction between students and
supervisors during thesis writing is considered in
(Hansen, Hansson, 2015). The authors analyze web-
discussions between students and supervisors, and
reveal that one of the main topics of collaboration was
«How to write».
Peer reviews to improve the quality of thesis
papers are considered in (Aghaeea, Keller, 2016),
(Aghaee, Hansson, 2013). The findings show a
considerable investment of the approach to increasing
thesis paper quality. Also, some limitations of the
approach are reported: the motivation of students to
write reviews, student review skills, the quality of
papers to be reviewed. To apply the approach
efficiently, thesis papers should appear as readable
and well-understandable drafts quite early. However,
our experience shows that working on the thesis paper
is often the last thing that undergraduates do in their
thesis projects, which leaves very little time to review
and discuss the texts.
The necessity of a special course that is directly
connected with the actual thesis project is argued in
(LaCourse, Rock, 2002). An early 1-credit course for
graduate students is offered. The course includes the
following topics: time management, scientific
method, thesis statement, justification and
background, the structure of the thesis paper, and
some other issues. The course aims to support the
student’s transition to an independent researcher.
However, the course addresses to graduate students,
who need to master individual research skills.
Meanwhile software engineering undergraduates are
less mature and academically oriented and focus more
on acquiring basic professional skills.
A number of special software systems are
developed to support thesis development: Thesis
Writer (Rapp, Kruse, 2016), SciPro system (Aghaeea,
Keller, 2016). These systems provide thesis
guidelines, support collaboration between students
and supervisors, provide facilities for peer-reviews,
and allow to collect various statistics to improve the
process. Such kind of software is useful for managing
thesis development, yet it cannot fully replace special
courses. Moreover, additional techniques need to be
employed to encourage students to put more effort
into writing and to facilitate thesis development
process.
A promising technique for structuring and
analyzing information that is actively applied in
education is mind mapping (Buzan, 1995).
Teacher-centered and student-centered mind
mapping modes are explored in (Fun, Maskat, 2010).
The authors found that the active involvement of
students in mind mapping is far more efficient than
presenting them with high quality maps constructed
by teachers.
Educational modules within the technical
secondary school essentially using mind mapping are
presented in (Tee, Yunos, 2012). Students use mind
mapping for reading literature, revising, note-taking,
etc. The study found the technique improves students’
learning achievements.
There exists numerous evidence on using mind
mapping in health education. In (Edwards, Cooper,
2010) mind mapping is considered as a teaching
resource in clinical education. It is explained how to
use this technique for preparing and reviewing
lectures, and for examinations. To address the issues
of poor paper quality, a faculty program is offered in
(Bickes, Schim, 2010). The program includes a
writing workshop, a revision of the grading rubric,
and a system of blind review for grading student