scholarly journals Critical Thinking Instruction and Minority Engineering Students

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Mallory Donawa
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Critical Thinking Instruction

scholarly journals A Systematic Approach To Teaching Critical Thinking Skills To Electrical And Computer Engineering Undergraduates

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Conn Welch Conn Welch ◽  
Jeffrey Hieb ◽  
James Graham
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Computing Methods ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Computer Engineering ◽  
Implicit Instruction ◽  
Incoming Freshmen ◽  
Critical Thinking Instruction ◽  
Pilot Implementation

Coursework that instills patterns of rigorous logical thought has long been a hallmark of the engineering curriculum.  However, today’s engineering students are expected to exhibit a wider range of thinking capabilities both to satisfy ABET requirements and to prepare the students to become successful practitioners.  This paper presents the initial results from a systematic effort to incorporate broader critical thinking instruction and assessment into electrical and computer engineering education as part of a university-wide quality enhancement program.  All incoming freshmen are given explicit and implicit instruction in critical thinking in ENGR 100: Introduction to Engineering and other engineering fundamentals courses, using the Paul-Elder framework of critical thinking to define and operationalize critical thinking.  This critical thinking foundation is reinforced later in the disciplinary courses so that students integrate critical thinking with the basic principles and practices of engineering.  In the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program, at the sophomore level, students use critical thinking skills which were developed during their engineering fundamentals courses, to analyze requirements and constraints which would apply in real-world design projects.  At the junior level, similar use of critical thinking is applied in an introductory computing methods course; and at the senior level, critical thinking skills are again strengthened and assessed in the capstone design course and in the professional issues and current topics seminar.  The latter course emphasizes understanding of professional ethics and current topics in electrical and computer engineering.  Initial data from this pilot implementation indicates statistically significant improvement in critical thinking skills in ECE students who have progressed through this sequence, and as a side benefit, it appears that writing skills also improve.

"First Sit Down and Play the Piano Beautifully ... ": Reading Carefully for Critical Thinking

1987 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira Gutteridge
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Reading Skill ◽  
Critical Thinking Instruction

Students in critical thinking courses are often instructed to "read carefully" as a prerequisite to thinking critically. This instruction, which seems like a simple preliminary caution, in fact reveals controversial assumptions about how readers read, and whether critical thinking instruction presupposes the reading skill it purports to teach.

scholarly journals A New Educational Thermodynamic Software to Promote Critical Thinking in Youth Engineering Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Romero Di Biasi ◽  
Guillermo Eliecer Valencia ◽  
Luis Guillermo Obregon
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Graphical User Interfaces ◽  
P Value ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Level Of Significance

This article presents the application of a new educational thermodynamic software called MOLECULARDISORDER, based on graphical user interfaces created in Matlab® to promote critical thinking in youth engineering students, by means of the energy and entropy balance application in different systems. Statistics of the results obtained by the youth students are shown to determine the influence of the software in a regular course in thermodynamics to promote critical thinking. Two case studies were done by the students, where parameters such as temperature of the fluid and metal surfaces, pressure of the system, mass of the fluid and solid, volume, and velocity of the fluid are used to obtain output variables such as enthalpy, entropy, changes in entropy, entropy production, and energy transfer in the chosen system. Four cognitive skills were considered to evaluate the cognitive competencies of interpreting, arguing and proposing, and interacting with the different graphical user interfaces; these cognitive skills (CS) were argumentative claim (CS1), modeling (CS2), interpreting data/information (CS3), and organization (CS4). Student´s T-test was used to compare the degree of difficulty of each criterion. The case studies were evaluated first without using the software and then with the use of the software to determine the significant effect of the software quantitatively. A population of 130 youth students was taken to perform the statistical analysis with a level of significance of 5%. With the help of the software, the students obtained an improvement when performing case study 1 since the p-value obtained was 0.03, indicating that there are significant differences between the results before and after taking the software. The overall averages of the grades for case study 1 had an increase after using the software from 3.74 to 4.04. The overall averages for case study 2 were also higher after taking the software from 3.44 to 3.75.

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