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

Figure 4. Survey responses to Question 1. 
Question 2: The goals of this course include improving students’: a) use of tablet pcs; b) critical thinking 
and decision-making skills; c) team building/communication skills; d) understanding of 
diversity/harassment; e) knowledge about engineering professionalism/ethics; f) understanding of 

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engineering design and practice; g) knowledge of departments/engineering disciplines at SpeedSchool; 
h) ability to use the software tools Excel, Maple, Matlab. As you read through the following list of 
course activities, think about whether each activity was effective or not effective in achieving one or 
more the goals. 
Critical Thinking Presentations and Assignments 
Department Analyze the Discipline Exercises 
Figure 5. Survey responses to Question 2. 
Sixty-seven percent of student respondents thought their critical thinking skills were somewhat better, 
better, or significantly better. This result is in line with student answers for most of the classroom 
activities questioned on the survey. Roughly 70% of the students seemed to appreciate faculty attempts 
to achieve the goals of the course. The critical thinking presentations and assignments were found to be 
effective in achieving course goals by 59.1% of the students while 10.4% had no opinion. The “Analyze 
the Discipline” exercises were judged effective by 71.5% with 10.9% having no opinion. Again, these 
results were consistent with most of the responses for other presentations, assignments and outcomes.
Responses about the effectiveness of the 16 class activities varied from 52% to 89% with the average 
69%.
Overview of Student Responses on Analyze the Discipline Exercises 
Table 2 shows a sample of student responses from three of the seven department presentations on the 
Analyze the Discipline assignment. In general, student responses to the questions of purpose and 
implications suggest that students had a sufficient understanding of the various engineering disciplines.
In some cases, the student responses to purpose exhibited a simplistic or limited view of the discipline.
For example, a majority of students described the purpose of civil engineering to “build bridges and 
structures.” This is likely a reflection of the presentation by the Civil Engineering Department which 
focused primarily on bridge failure and design. Student responses to implications/consequences were 
often focused on “life or death” issues. For example, many responses on the civil engineering 
assignment mentioned bridge failures leading to death. Responses on the bioengineering assignment 
frequently contrasted benefits to human health and life with the possibility for fatal mistakes. Even 

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some responses on the computer engineering assignment mentioned the possibility of death due to 
engineering errors.
Assumptions and point of view seemed to be less understood by the majority of students. Many 
responses to the question of assumptions described assumptions people make about engineers in that 
particular discipline. For example, “civil engineers wear hard hats” or “computer engineers work on 
computers all day.” The most common responses for point of view described subspecialties of the 
discipline in question.
Analysis of Selected Students’ Performance 
Faculty impressions of individual student results for all seven assignments are shown in Table 3. The 
categories are high achievers (HA), low achievers (LA), and improvers (I) as identified by the teaching 
assistants. Shown also is the course grade the students received. Department abbreviations are 
Bioengineering (BE), Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Chemical Engineering (CHE), 
Computer Engineering and Computer Science (CECS), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), 
Mechanical Engineering (ME), Industrial Engineering (IE). The comment column gives faculty 
impressions after studying the responses in the order they were completed by students. The TAs gave 
participation points for these assignments; they were not graded as a separate written assignment, which 
might account for some students not taking them as seriously as desired by faculty.