Unable to find the paper but can link you to the professor doing the research: https://publish.illinois.edu/glherman/conceptual-change-in-engineering-education/

Unable to find the paper but can link you to the professor doing the research: https://publish.illinois.edu/glherman/conceptual-change-in-engineering-education/ https://publish.illinois.edu/glherman/conceptual-change-in-e... The paper linked adjacent to this comment looks interesting as well. What I gathered from the experience was that if you can capture student activity while they are tracing (e.g. eye tracking, recording incremental changes to a doodling interface and doing some pattern recognition on it, etc) you can fairly accurately and repeatably figure out their structural thinking ability.