Incorporating Critical Thinking into an Engineering Undergraduate Learning Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical thinking extends to all aspects of professional engineering, especially in technical development, and, since the introduction of the ABET 2000 criteria, there has been an increased emphasis in engineering education on the development of critical thinking skills. What is hoped for is that the students obtain critical thinking skills to complement their abundant logical thinking skills. Critical thinking is a developmental skill that cannot be taught simply by traditional methods, i.e., step-by-step instruction followed by repetitive skills, as used for logical thinking skills. The research and development reported here is concerned with outlining how students first can be alerted to what critical thinking is, and how critical thinking can be nurtured through practical experience with appropriate guidance and reinforcement. The module ‘Introduction to Fluid Mechanics’ has been selected to demonstrate how formal critical thinking components may be introduced with the development of principles of logic and an obligatory problem solving procedure. A method of assessment during various phases of critical thinking, i.e., initial design or set-up, testing of method or prototype, and evaluation of the results, of open-ended assignments in engineering for each year of the undergraduate course has been developed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".