Critical thinking: an investigation into how it is defined, taught and assessed in a sample of Australian undergraduate engineering education

This study explores critical thinking and its relationship with Australian engineering education. Within this it firstly explores how critical thinking can be defined for an engineering education context. Previous studies have found that engineers had a poor conceptualisation of critical thinking and that more broadly there was a lack of consensus on how critical thinking was defined. One of the purposes of this doctoral research was to develop a user-centred functional definition of critical thinking for Australian engineering education that has consensus between stakeholders. The research examined how academic literature defined critical thinking, how professional engineers defined and used critical thinking as part of their work, as well as how engineering academics defined critical thinking. Multiple methods were employed under an interpretivist research approach to explore these three lenses informed by the research question: • How can critical thinking be defined in the context of Australian engineering education? The research identified commonalities in how academic literature defined critical thinking along 4 themes: skills, quality standards, knowledge, and dispositions. These themes were also evident in how professional engineers and engineering academics discussed the definition of critical thinking. Compared to academic literature professional engineers and engineering academics had a narrower conception of critical thinking, with half of the academic involved reporting not being sure of their responses. A definition of critical thinking for engineering that was grounded in academic literature and contextualised to the engineering profession was proposed from a synthesis of these findings. This definition represents a novel contribution to addressing the lack of contextually relevant definition of critical thinking for engineering.  This study also explores how critical thinking was integrated into Australian engineering education curriculum through teaching and assessment designs. Previous studies in engineering have seldom linked curriculum back to theories of critical thinking, with no work to the extent of the author’s knowledge, making comparisons between year levels and context. Work proposing teaching and assessment of critical thinking is not well situated in the engineering discipline. Therefore, one of the other purposes of this study was to recommend practice for teaching and assessing critical thinking skills in an integrated manner across year levels in engineering education. The research examined teaching and assessment activities in eight core courses from the mechanical engineering degree programs at two universities, University A and University B. These subjects included Design 1A, Design 1B, Design 2A, Design 2B, Thermodynamics 1A, Thermodynamics 1B, Materials 1A and Materials 2A. It did this through 5 lines of research also under an interpretivist research approach to shed light on a different core element of pedagogy as identified by the 3P (Presage, Process, Product) model of learning. These lines of investigation were framed against two research questions situated in the context of Australian engineering education: • How does curriculum and assessments provide opportunities for critical thinking skill development and demonstration? • How does the implementation of curriculum and assessments reflect critical thinking skills usage? The research identified that there is more development of CT skills than what is currently visible within curriculum. It also identified that there is a need to provide a diverse mix of experiences and opportunities for students throughout their degree program in different year levels and courses using different delivery methods. This outcomes of the 5 lines of research associated with teaching and research were synthesised and recommendations for teaching and assessing critical thinking skills in undergraduate engineering education were proposed. These recommendations provide a guide for course coordinators as well as program directors to guide course development at an individual and holistic level respectively. This proposition represents a novel contribution to understanding how critical thinking skills may be taught and assessed as an embedded part of engineering curriculum.