Developing A Rubric To Assess Critical Thinking In Assignments With An Open Ended Component
Karen Alfrey, Elaine Cooney
Abstract
The ability to think critically is vital to success in engineering and technology practice. Employers in these fields, however, consistently identify critical thinking as one of the skills that is not sufficiently developed in new college graduates, and call upon engineering and technology educators to address this obvious need. Unfortunately, critical thinking is a developmental skill that cannot be taught simply by the usual methods -step-by-step instruction followed by repetitive drills -used for other technical skills. Critical thinking must instead be nurtured through practical experience solving problems with appropriate guidance and reinforcement. One very effective context for developing such skills is in open-ended assignments with no single "right" answer, to which students must apply not only their technical knowledge, but also an element of critical judgment, to determine which approach among many possible will yield the most reasonable and applicable results.