Cultivating Thinking Skills in the Global Engineering Student

1. Cultivating Thinking Skills in the Global Engineering Student Yu-Ling Cheng & Lisa Romkey University of Toronto

2. Ice-Breaker In groups, share the following: • Who are you and where are you from? • Why are you at this conference? • Why are you at this workshop? Each participant will be introduced to the group by another participant.

3. Why Thinking?Why Now?

4. Information/Knowledge Explosion • By 2010, amount of digital content will double every 11 hours (Steven Mills, Senior VP of IBM Software) • Peer-reviewed publications growing exponentially • Emerging areas of the last 10 years • Biomedical engineering, nanoengineering, energy • What are the fundamentals? • Challenge to define required content • What will emerge in the next 50 years?

5. Knowledge Explosion: # of Medline Publications Per Year 5

6. Information vs KnowledgeHow and What Are Students Learning • Google first • And last? • How much thought after googling? • Abundance of information • Is “free” information valued? • Do students have a good mental model to help organize new information? • Does information become knowledge?

7. Global Challenges ? • Calculus • Thermodynamics • Circuits • Statics • Fluid mechanics • Materials • Chemistry • Physics • Biology Hunger Poverty War Natural disasters Environment Climate Change

8. Workshop Outline 1) Recognize that we predominately focus on content (which is expanding rapidly) and not explicitly on the thinking skills required to internalize the content 2) Understand the role of thinking skills, competencies and traits in the development of the engineer 3) Explore how faculty can identify good thinking, and establish a learning environment that focuses on thinking

9. Today’s Project A take home “poster” that represents your own “model of thinking” for a good engineer • Your final product will be a result of discussions with peers, existing models and reflection • Creating a poster facilitates sharing and creativity

10. Individual Exercise #1 Define a “Good Engineer” Write your definition in paragraph or point form.

11. Individual Exercise #2 What are the required thinking skills, competencies and traits (SCT) of an engineer? Write each one down on a separate sticky note, and consider: • Which SCT’s are needed for engineers to address global challenges? • Which SCT’s are needed for engineers to stay relevant and up-to-date in an environment of rapid knowledge growth?

12. Think-Pair-Share Share results from your individual exercise with a partner and consider the following: • Work together to clarify and re-articulate thinking skills that are fuzzy. Question for details. What does X mean? Think of examples from your own class. Make more sticky notes as needed. • Is your definition of a “good engineer” in sync with your skills, traits and competencies? • “Borrow” ideas from your partner as you see fit.

13. Group Report Back (SCT’s)

14. Small Group Discussion Let’s talk about your students: • What aspects of thinking skills do you see in your students? • What do you see missing from your students’ work? • What fraction of your students have good thinking skills? • What changes do you see from first year to graduation?

15. Group Report Back

16. Background on Thinking Models

17. What is Critical Thinking? “Critical Thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” - Richard Paul, Foundation for Critical Thinking

18. Results of Critical Thinking A Well-Cultivated Critical Thinker: • Raises important questions, formulating them clearly and precisely • Gathers and assesses relevant information and interprets it carefully • Comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions • Thinks with an open mind, recognizing their assumptions and the consequences of their thinking • Communicates effectively with others about their thinking • Paul and Elder, the Foundation for Critical Thinking

19. Paul & Elder Framework Standards Clarity Accuracy Relevance Logicalness Breadth Precision Fairness Depth Traits Humility Autonomy Integrity Courage Perseverance Confidence Empathy Fair-mindedness Elements Purpose Question Information Interpretation Concepts Assumptions Consequences Point of View Traits that determine the integrity and insight of one’s thinking Applied to ensure quality of thinking Components of any document or piece of work; technical or persuasive

20. What is Critical Thinking? “A quality of thinking that is characterized by self-regulated deliberations on a challenge situation or task that involve exploring and generating alternatives, and making evaluative judgements. These judgements are based on criteria, which provide justifications for the conclusion, and are applied to meaning, relational, empirical or value claims” - Van Gyn and Ford, 2006

21. Van Gyn & Ford Framework

22. Intellectual Habits

23. Intellectual Deliberations

24. Reflexive Disposition

25. Systems Thinking • A system is more than the sum of its parts • Properties emerge from the “whole” and its context, and these need to be identified • Identifying cultural, political, economic, social and environmental contextual characteristics • Recognition of the impact of how the individual perspective impacts the understanding of the system • Understand and accept complexity • The concept of framing Brian Wilson, Peter Checkland, Peter Senge

26. Cultural Thinking • The way we organize knowledge depends on our cultural background and experiences • This knowledge also impacts how we view others and their knowledge • There is a need to recognize our own “cultural thinking” and also understand the cultural norms of others Shinobu Kitayama, Richard Nisbett, Denise Park

27. Creative Thinking • Making something new • Methods of idea and concept generation • Identifying new connections between existing ideas or concepts • Assumption-breaking • Lateral thinking (moving from a known to an unknown idea) • Comfort with ambiguity • Comfort with failure and mistakes Edward de Bono

28. Higher Level Thinking • Are you asking the right questions? Working on the right problems? • How do you decide what to work on? • Are your tools appropriate and effective? Do you have the necessary skills/team? • What are the limitations of your knowledge? • What are the societal implications of technology? (Are you working on the right problems?)

29. Exercise Using your initial ideas, the sharing with your partner and the concepts we just discussed: • Organize your skills, competencies and traits into groups on your poster that make sense to you • How do the SCT’s relate to each other? • Consider your own course or discipline as you start to build your framework

30. Frameworks… • Skill 1 • Skill 2 • Skill 3 • Skill 4 • Skill 5 • Etc… Can look like a list…or a visual map

31. Revisit “Good Engineer” Based on your new ideas about thinking, does your definition of a good engineer still fit? Does it need to be updated? Write down your best version on your poster.

32. Sharing Perspectives • Hang up your poster • Look at the thinking models of other participants, provide comments via sticky-notes • “Shop around” for new ideas and modify your framework as you see fit • What commonalities do you see? What differences do you observe?

33. Putting Your Framework to Use • Take one element from your framework • Describe the qualities and process that would prove a student was demonstrating the skill successfully • “Synthesis of Information” • Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of different view points • Selection of information/sources relevant to the question • Credible interpretation of information • Accurate interpretation of information • Relevant connections among ideas

34. Creating a Learning Objective • Develop a learning objective or two that are inclusive of good thinking for your course • Learning Objective: an explicit statement of the intended result of student learning which includes how students will demonstrate their learning • The learning objective should reflect a concept about which you want students to think carefully and critically. • Example: “Review conflicting viewpoints on nuclear energy”

35. Creating a Learning Objective Improving the Objective: • Identify the concepts from your poster that you would like to incorporate, and re-write the objective • “Review conflicting viewpoints of the growth of nuclear energy, analyzing each respective groups’ data and information for credibility, and construct a comparative analysis of the technical, economic, political and social aspects of nuclear energy.” • Add the objective to your poster

36. Take Home Project Develop a problem or assignment for your course that addresses your written learning objective about thinking skills

37. Faculty Challenges Paul, Elder and Bartell (1997) • 140 faculty members surveyed at colleges and universities in California • 89% said that CT was a primary objective in their course • 19% could give a coherent definition • 9% provided evidence that they specifically taught for CT

38. Faculty Challenges Faculty Perception of Critical Thinking (Scott, 1998) • Differences demonstrated between what educators and practitioners found to be important • Faculty identified some gaps in the critical thinking skills of students – specifically weighing alternatives and questioning assumptions • Faculty understood the need for specific instructional strategies, but lacked the knowledge and confidence to employ them • Content/knowledge was ranked higher than problem solving skills, reasoning and encouraging reflection

39. Summing Up What support do faculty need to emphasize good thinking?