AC 2009-653: DEVELOPING A RUBRIC TO ASSESS CRITICAL THINKING IN ASSIGNMENTS WITH AN OPEN-ENDED COMPONENT

The ability to think critically is vital to success in engineering and technology practice. Employers in these fields, however, consistently identify critical thinking as one of the skills that is not sufficiently developed in new college graduates, and call upon engineering and technology educators to address this obvious need. Unfortunately, critical thinking is a developmental skill that cannot be taught simply by the usual methods – step-by-step instruction followed by repetitive drills – used for other technical skills. Critical thinking must instead be nurtured through practical experience solving problems with appropriate guidance and reinforcement. One very effective context for developing such skills is in open-ended assignments with no single “right” answer, to which students must apply not only their technical knowledge, but also an element of critical judgment, to determine which approach among many possible will yield the most reasonable and applicable results. For educators, a key component of nurturing critical thinking is learning to recognize and reinforce it when it happens, or nudge students toward such behaviors when it is not happening but should be. Toward that end, we have developed a rubric to assess critical thinking during several phases (initial design or set-up; testing of method; evaluation of results) of open-ended assignments in engineering and technology. The rubric is designed to be generally applicable to open-ended assignments at every level (freshman through senior) in engineering and technology, allowing users to track the development of critical thinking skills as students progress through the curriculum. We present the rubric and preliminary results from applying it to two different open-ended assignments.