Employing Socratic Pedagogy To Improve Engineering Students’ Critical Reasoning Skills: Teaching By Asking Instead Of By Telling

Engineering faculty agree almost universally that the development of students’ higherorder intellectual or cognitive abilities is one of the most important educational tasks of engineering programs. These abilities underpin our students’ perceptions of the world and the consequent decisions they make. Specifically, critical thinking (critical intelligence) – the capacity to probe and evaluate skillfully, analytically and fairly the quality of evidence, formulas, precepts and pieces of received wisdom that too often go unexamined and unchallenged and detect inaccuracies, error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias – is central to both personal success and national needs. This paper assumes that the capacity of undergraduate engineering students to learn to apply good reasoning to problem solutions can be nurtured and developed by an educational process aimed directly at developing students’ critical thinking skills. More specifically, the paper reports on the judicious and amiable use of the Socratic Method of teaching by systematic questioning – instead of teaching by telling – to emphasize and foster critical reasoning skills in electrical engineering, computer engineering and engineering physics undergraduate students at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, California). The selective, careful use of the Socratic Method (in combination with traditional lectures and active learning exercises) in electrical circuits, linear systems, signal processing, probability and statistics, electronic communications, and senior capstone design project courses, teaching laboratories and projects helped improve student participation, got the students actively involved and excited about the projects and the material being taught, motivated the students to better master course content and taught the students to learn to think and reason more clearly, accurately, relevantly, logically, rationally, ethically and responsibly. This paper discusses how the judicious, sensible and affable use of the Socratic Method in the aforementioned educational settings facilitated the development of students who are learning to possess the basic skills of thought and reasoning such as the ability to: identify, formulate and clarify questions; gather relevant data; identify key assumptions; identify the sources of the data and assumptions, and evaluate the relevancy and accuracy of the data and assumptions; identify and trace significant implications of the data and assumptions; consider alternative explanations without distortion or self-deception; and reason to logical, rational, responsible and ethical conclusions and decisions. The Socratic Method does not always work in all contexts nor for all students, but it can be effective for most students most of the time. The paper discusses how the Method was used to integrate questioning and learning in the aforementioned courses, laboratories and projects to stimulate and challenge students, to assist them to acquire knowledge, and to help students discipline their mind by developing intellectual skills and traits of mind such as intellectual acuity, intellectual honesty, intellectual humility, intellectual P ge 13486.2 perseverance, intellectual autonomy, intellectual empathy, intellectual integrity and intellectual responsibility. These skills and traits plant the seeds to help prepare students to: (a) become practicing professionals who are fair-minded, who have confidence in reason and who are undaunted when faced with the need to master new technologies; (b) become scholars undertaking advanced study; (c) take ownership of new ideas and modes of reflective thinking and reasoning; and (d) be prepared and motivated to develop into life-long self-directed and independent, yet collaborative, learners who possess an improved ability to speak, write and listen and the mental discipline needed to apply sound judgment and problem-solving skills to novel problems. Motivation for Using the Socratic Questioning and Some Specific Techniques for Implementing the Socratic Method Teaching occurs not just through imparting information but also through arousing intellectual passions and enthusiastically presenting an example of thought in action. All knowledge, like all education, is ultimately driven by the questions asked. As engineering educators, one of our tasks is to pose the right questions, and help students to learn to ask the right questions and to learn to formulate reasoned answers. These are relatively difficult teaching goals. This paper proposes that it may be possible to accomplish these goals by combining the use of traditional lectures with active and collaborative learning and with the Socratic Method of directive questioning/reasoning, in which the instructor poses a problem and asks a series of directive, probing questions, to help students follow a particular approach to solving the problem. The directed questions contain useful information to assist students in (a) understanding the problem, (b) devising a plan to solve the problem, (c) carrying out the plan, and, finally, (d) reviewing/extending the problem. In the last step [step (d)], students are encouraged to reflect and look back at the implications of the problem solution, what the student has done, what worked and what didn't, to enable the student to better understand the outcome of the problem solution and to predict what strategy to use to solve future problems, if these relate to the original problem. Throughout the entire process [steps (a) through (d)], if the student gets “stuck,” the instructor may supply a hint. The result is an effective, lively give-and-take dialog with students that fosters a process of progressively sharpened understanding, helping students reason their way to the problem solution or to greater intuitive understanding of basic and advanced engineering, physical and mathematical concepts. The first author of this paper generally presents material in class as a balance between a traditional lecture style, using overhead transparencies together with providing students with detailed handouts containing factual material (such as lengthy mathematical derivations, complicated drawings/plots or a large number of seemingly unrelated facts). Copies of the handouts are provided to the students well in advance of the class meeting. The notes are highly detailed but also cryptic enough that they don't serve as a substitute for attending lecture. The notes significantly lessen (but not eliminate) students’ writing burden: students annotate the handouts during lecture, but they do not have to write constantly and frantically at the expense of comprehending. This frees up the students’ P ge 13486.3 and the instructor’s time for asking questions, thinking about the answers, formulating and articulating answers, refining the answers, clarifying key points of physical principles and mathematical expressions and equations, listening to and learning from each other, developing intuitive and physical insights and mathematical skills, improving understanding and solving example problems from modern engineering practice. The classical lecture format has its advantages, but its main disadvantage is that if the instructor is doing almost all the talking, it is difficult to gauge students’ understanding of the material. Watching students' faces (glazed looks spread across the class when the instructor may or may not be making sense) is not an accurate, reliable technique to provide useful information on the level of students’ comprehension. This necessitates the need to try some other technique to obtain feedback from the class as to whether they are "getting it" and to adjust the lectures if they are not. The Socratic methods attempts to address that need by having students solve problems verbally in class with the aid of a directed line of questioning. When the students and the instructor collaboratively solve an example problem in lab or lecture, such as a mathematical derivation or a design problem, the instructor can set up the introduction to the problem and then require the students to orally carry out the remaining work involved in solving the problem, almost entirely on their own with almost no interference from the instructor. One by one, each and every student is required to contribute to the step-by-step solution of the problem: the first student sitting in the first row in the classroom is asked to provide the initial listing of the goals and objectives of the problem, then the student sitting right behind the first student is asked to setup the first equation, then the student sitting right behind the second student is asked to continue the equation setup or to solve the equation that was set up by the prior student, and so on. Each student in turn supplies the next step in the design problem solution, or the next line of a computer program or the next step in the mathematical derivation. This way, the instructor can gauge immediately how much students understand. And the lecture is not progressing too fast for the students, since they supply all the answers. Students work methodically and collaboratively through all the various steps of the problem solution, culminating in a sanity check of the final result. This problem solution process creates a more playful, and simultaneously more intellectually charged atmosphere in the classroom. Throughout the process, there is minimal involvement on the teacher’s part, except to provide hints and to ask the students directed questions to help them make progress if they are “stuck.” Students are also encouraged to ask questions if they are “stuck” or if they are confused. Specific Examples of Socratic Questioning The following are example transcripts of portions of teaching sessions using the Socratic Method in undergraduate engineering courses at the University of the Pacific. Example 1. Example transcript of a portion of a teaching session, using the So