Reflecting on engineering concepts: Effects on critical thinking

Reflective writing helps improve critical thinking skills, such as questioning and reasoning, recognizing assumptions, presenting and evaluating data, and drawing conclusions: all important abilities for engineering students. Thus, to encourage engineering students to reflect on material taught in a technical course, fifteen journal prompts were developed based on Bloom´s Taxonomy. Once or twice a week, the prompts were delivered to students through an online classroom management system, and the students wrote short responses online. When students understood that a contemplative response to the prompts would increase both understanding and technical competency, nearly 90% completed the assignments. A coding method was developed to analyze the written responses, to determine which critical thinking skills the students were applying. The initial analysis shows that the students who understood the purpose of the journal responses applied all four types of critical thinking skills as they wrote Results from the current data will be presented at the conference, and a discussion for a more in-depth analysis will be initiated.