Engaging Freshman Engineers Using the Paul-Elder Model of Critical Thinking

This paper presents an exercise, or series of exercises, developed by the authors for their Introduction to Engineering course. Two major course components are critical thinking and departmental presentations. The critical thinking framework includes eight elements of thought: purpose, question at issue, information, inferences, concepts, assumptions, implications, and point of view. There are seven different engineering disciplines taught at the school, each in their own department. Each department gives a class long presentation as part of the course. The developed assignment is given for each department presentation with the intention of reinforcing elements from the university’s critical thinking framework and improving student engagement in departmental presentations. Student survey responses indicated that students found the assignment effective in meeting some of the course goals, such as improving their critical thinking skills. An analysis of selected students’ work on these assignments indicate that most students had some success in identifying salient purposes, concepts, and questions at issue for each engineering discipline for which there was a department presentation. It was also clear that point of view was an element with which students consistently struggled.