Building Critical Thinking Skills through Geotechnical CAT-Apps

Engineering judgment and critical thinking skills are widely sought-after skills in geotechnical engineering education in order to prepare students for engineering practice and to meet ABET accreditation outcomes. The Critical-Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) is an internationally recognized instrument for assessing critical thinking skills that has been developed at Tennessee Tech. The skills tested by the CAT include evaluation of information, creative thinking, learning and problem solving, and communication. In recent years, the Center for Assessment and Improvement of Learning at Tennessee Tech has begun to promote the development of CAT-Applications (CAT-Apps). CAT-Apps are sets of discipline-specific questions that are specifically designed to mimic at least one of the categories tested by the CAT. As students answer CAT-type questions within the context of their discipline, the students build critical thinking skills by exercising thought processes known to be linked with critical thinking. This paper describes the development and implementation of a set of 13 CAT-Apps targeted at entry-level geotechnical engineering. Some of the CAT-Apps were used within the context of such a course. Gains in critical thinking skills were measured by administering the conventional CAT test to a single class of students at the beginning and end of the course in which the CAT-Apps were used. The results are discussed, and recommendations are provided for implementing CAT-Apps or similar questioning techniques in other courses and contexts.