Impact of critical thinking instruction on first year engineering students

The advancement of student ability to think critically is a learning outcome shared across a wide range of fields. We are instructors in a first year engineering design and communication course containing critical thinking interventions. We constantly struggle to determine the effectiveness of those interventions. This study is a work-in-progress report on one component of a large multi-institutional study on teaching and evaluating critical thinking in first year engineering students. In this study we describe the pitfalls encountered in the initial iteration of this study, such as difficulty in finding a standard test for critical thinking relevant to engineering students and in securing student participation. We describe the second iteration of the study, designed to avoid these initial pitfalls, and give details about our methodology and the conclusions we hope to draw upon analysis of the data. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for a work-in-progress report is plan for future expansion of data collection and analysis.