Paper entitled Developing the Critical Thinking Skills of Students in Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University

1. Developing the Critical Thinking Skills of
Students in Civil and Building
Engineering at Loughborough University
Dr Lynda Gibbins
Dr Glynis Perkin
Professor Graham Sander

2. Overview
• Background
• What is Critical Thinking (CT)?
• The importance of CT
• Research methods – 4 strands
• Programme Directors’ views on the CT skills of students
• Modules which specify CT
• Students’ understanding of CT
• Staff perspective on the CT skills of students
• The role of tutorials in promoting CT
• Conclusions

3. Background
• Programme Directors in Civil and Building Engineering
(CBE) at Loughborough University expressed concerns
that students are not demonstrating CT thinking skills
when undertaking research-based tasks and final year
projects
• Undergraduate students in five out of the seven CBE
programmes at Loughborough University take a
communications module in their first year which explicitly
teaches aspects of critical thinking

4. What is Critical Thinking?
• For our project we identified CT as the ability to:
– Analyse situations, problems and claims
– Identify assumptions and bias
– Judge credibility of evidence or claims
– Evaluate arguments
– Produce well-founded arguments
– Draw well-founded conclusions

5. The Importance of Critical Thinking
• Employers require employees to have the ability to adapt
quickly to change, be able to analyse new and complex
situations, challenge accepted wisdom and make rational
decisions
• Engineering accrediting bodies expect students to
demonstrate CT; for example, “…critically evaluate
arguments, assumptions, abstract concepts and data (that
may be incomplete), to make judgements and to frame
appropriate questions to achieve a solution - or identify a
range of solutions - to a problem”
(Engineering Council (2014), UK-SPEC
http://www.engc.org.uk/ukspec.aspx )

6. Research Methods – 4 Strands
• In-depth discussions with four Programme Directors
to gain an insight into the perceived problem
• Analysis of 93 CBE non-finalist undergraduate
module specifications
• Questionnaires completed by 39 undergraduate
students
• Interviews undertaken with ten academic staff

7. Programme Directors’ Views on the
Critical Thinking Skills of Students
4 Interviews
• The Programme Directors agreed that there was a wide variation in
students’ CT skills
• The majority of students had to be prompted to undertake a
literature review
• They were also described as poor at critiquing the literature they
read and quoted
• There was only one programme, on which students are sponsored
by Companies, where CT skills were described as good

8. Modules that Include Critical
Thinking Skills
Analysis
• Where possible all non-finalist undergraduate modules were
investigated for CT content. For modules where some element was
explicitly stated in the specification we examined the assessment
criteria and associated tasks to determine where and how often CT
skills were being assessed
• From the available information it appears that 21 out of 93 non-final
year undergraduate modules explicitly teach and, to some extent,
assess CT
• Tutorials were mentioned as providing an opportunity for CT skills to
be developed
• Two CBE programmes, BEng and MEng have less exposure to CT

9. Students’ Understanding of Critical
Thinking
39 Completed Questionnaires
• Most respondents understand the term CT
• Most respondents believe that CT is important,
however, when asked why it is important 31% of
students did not provide an answer
• Students on the BEng and MEng programmes
reported less teaching of CT than students on
other programmes which agrees with our
investigation of module content

10. Staff Perspective on the Critical
Thinking Skills of Students
10 Interviews
• Most staff described students’ CT skills as ranging from very poor to
extremely proficient, with many students requiring a lot of help when
undertaking research-based projects
• Some staff believe that school background may account for certain
differences, with private schools seen as requiring pupils to do more
critiquing than UK state schools
• Now this issue has been raised, the prevailing view is that lecturers need
to mention CT skills more frequently and students need to have CT skills
embedded in more modules throughout their undergraduate study
• If students are going to employ CT there needs to be more tasks that
assess these skills

11. The Role of Tutorials in Promoting
Critical Thinking
Analysis and Questionnaires
• In several module specifications the use of tutorial
time to promote development of CT skills was explicitly
mentioned
• Almost all of the BEng and MEng respondents stated
that their tutorials do not provide opportunity for CT
• Most of the respondents from the other programmes
believed that tutorials do offer opportunity for CT

12. Conclusions
• From the student perspective, there is
understanding of the meaning and importance of
CT
• From the staff perspective, most students do not
use CT unless explicitly asked to do so and then
many of them require help and advice
• CT needs to be embedded and assessed in more
modules as it is a skill that is developed over time

13. Finally
Thank you for attending
and
question time?
Glynis
G.Perkin@lboro.ac.uk