Exploration of Critical Thinking Attributes in an Innovative Undergraduate STEM Program

Abstract

Experiences during post-secondary education can accentuate the ongoing, ever-changing process of developing 21st-century skills for undergraduate students. These 21^st-century skills, including critical thinking (CT), are important for students to develop for competitive job placement after graduation. The future workforce requires diverse knowledge, skills, and dispositions to navigate complex and ever-changing jobs, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Purpose: This project aimed to qualitatively investigate previously determined quantitative attributes of CT to gain a deeper understanding of how these attributes manifest themselves in undergraduate STEM scholars’ problem-solving and decision-making.

Sample: Twelve program undergraduate student participants from a STEM professional development program partook in completing materials for this study.

Methods: We used a phenomenology approach to explore the nuances of CT attributes from the responses of our program participants. We explored how the eight CT attributes (induction, analysis, inference, evaluation, deduction, interpretation, explanation, numeracy) emerged from participant responses, in isolation and in interaction with each other in undergraduate STEM students’ responses to real-world scenarios to find potential trends or insights to better understand the intricate nature of critical thinking as a construct.

Results: While we aimed to explore CT attributes in isolation based on their previously defined definitions, our findings demonstrate that certain CT attributes occurred concurrently with other CT attributes at higher frequencies than others (e.g., analysis and induction). These concurrent attributes show that undergraduate students identified various entry points to a real-life scenario, and simultaneously find multiple solutions to these complex problems. The findings of this exploratory study suggest areas for STEM program improvement based on the qualitative examination of whether CT attributes are present, and how they might also happen concurrently more frequently when undergraduate students face real-life decision-making scenarios.

Conclusions: Findings from this study will help create a more robust program model for undergraduate student development to meet STEM workforce demands and competitive job placement after graduation. A deep understanding of what makes up this complex construct is essential to increase students’ CT skills. Further research in this area may explore how CT attributes offer additional insights for framing undergraduate professional development programs. With careful attention to distinct and concurrent attributes, carefully designed professional development might be more effective and transferrable to STEM fields.