Practical, authentic and sustainable development and assessment of critical thinking in engineering through model eliciting activities

摘要

Higher order skills such as problem solving or critical thinking are key attributes for graduates of any engineering program, are amongst industries highly desired skills for new employees and are considered a hallmark of a university education. The application of critical thinking helps students solve ill-defined, open-ended, complex problems through the analysis and evaluation of information, evaluating arguments, and developing conclusions resulting from sound reasoning. These complex problems are typical of those encountered in professional engineering practice, and require the reflective, self-regulatory judgment exemplified by critical thinking. While most programs claim to develop critical thinking in some manner, deliberate development and direct assessment of critical thinking using some kind of conceptual framework is less common and quite challenging. This is due to a multitude of factors: the lack of consensus on a definition of critical thinking, debate on whether or not critical thinking skills are generic or domain specific, the large number of available frameworks describing the elements, skills, traits and attributes of critical thinking and the difficulty in assessing a complex cognitive and metacognitive skill.