New Perspectives in Science Education

Nowadays, it is considered essential to have a society integrated by reflective, responsible citizens capable of making reasoned decisions on different issues related to science and technology [1]. In the case of engineering students, the development of these critical thinking skills is especially important since any engineer must be able to persuade the interlocutor about a problem or its solution [2], as well as to overcome one of the main obstacles found in the literature, which is the difficulty in communication skills that engineers encounter when expressing formal reasoning [3]. The aim of this paper is to compare the perceptions of critical thinking skills presented by a sample of students in the second year of the Industrial Technologies Engineering Degree at the University of Malaga (Spain) (N=26) with those of graduated engineers who are continuing their training in a Master's Degree (N=19). The survey proposed by Santiuste et al. [4] to assess the development of critical thinking skills was used as a data collection instrument. This survey consists of 30 items grouped into two dimensions (substantive, focused on the person's own points of view, and dialogic, the confrontation between points of view of two or more people). Three categories (reading, expressing in writing, and listening and expressing orally) are established within each dimension. The results obtained through the Mann-Whitney U test reveal that there are statistically significant differences in the reading category of the substantive dimension, although differences were also detected in some items of the other two categories, and in all cases in favour of graduate engineers. In no case were differences detected in the dialogic dimension. These results indicate that, after undergraduate training, engineers are autonomously able to progress in the development of critical thinking skills in the substantive dimension. However, more specific training is required for the dialogic dimension that should be promoted from the engineering degrees and that is so necessary for their professional activity.  

Keywords: Critical thinking, Engineering students, Higher Education

References:

[1] Osborne, J. (2014) Teaching critical thinking. New directions in science education? School Science Review, 352, 53-62.

[2] Jonassen, D.H. & Kim, B. (2010). Arguing to learn and learning to argue design justifications and guidelines. Educational Technology Research and Development, 58, 439-457.

[3] Escudeiro, N., Barata, A. & Lobo, C. (2011). Enhancing students teamwork and communication skills in international settings. Proceedings of 2011 International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2011) (pp. 57-64). Turkey: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

[4] Santiuste, B. (Coord.), Ayala, C., Barriguete, C., García, E., Gonzales, J., Rossignoli, J., Toledo, E. (2001). El pensamiento crítico en la práctica educativa. Madrid: Fugaz.