Use of argument maps to promote critical thinking in engineering education

One challenge faced in the engineering education, is the need to imbue both technical competence and critical thinking skills within the bounds of academic program delivery. While technical competence can be built and assessed using structured and/or quantitative exercises, critical thinking is a skill that is both difficult to cultivate and to assess. Critical thinking involves the possession of both an expert mental model as well as the ability to leverage this model in various tasks. In engineering education, these tasks include making and justifying design choices, system optimization, and predicting system performance. Prior work, by one of the authors, explored the role of graphic organizers in the development of student´s mental models. This paper describes action research underway, to explore the use of the argument map, as a structured means of leveraging mental models to promote critical thinking. In this paper, interactive small-group tasks based on argument maps are presented, and outputs generated by the initial cohort of undergraduate senior learners on these tasks are examined for evidence of critical thinking. These items form the basis of a longer-term longitudinal study in which the most effective means of deploying argument maps for promoting critical thinking will be examined.