The goal of an undergraduate engineering education is to provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to solve real world problems. Creativity and critical thinking are two abilities essential for success in the workplace, and are highly sought after by employers. However, there is evidence of decreasing creativity and critical thinking in senior engineering students. This study sought to understand if freshman engineering students are measurably more creative, but less capable of critical thinking, than senior undergraduate engineering students. Creativity and critical thinking were measured using the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP) and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA), respectively. The data suggest that freshman engineering students were significantly more creative than senior engineering students. However, senior engineering students were found to be no better at critical thinking than their freshman counterparts. When compared to normative data, the senior engineering students underperformed significantly compared to the general population of senior college students. With study limitations in mind, these findings may suggest that senior engineering students are not only less creative, but also less capable of critical thinking, than when they started their engineering program. If this is indeed the appropriate conclusion, then there is a need to understand the underlying issues driving the decline of creativity and critical thinking in engineering undergraduate students.
The UCF College of Medicine M.D. curriculum includes a 16‐week Structure and Function module in the first year in which students learn basic medical physiology. The module includes five high‐fidelity simulations that require students to apply physiological knowledge to develop treatment plans in acute care situations. Students work collaboratively in teams of six in a 15 min period to complete a simulation exercise, each of which is followed by debriefs on physiological reasoning and the effectiveness of team process. Past experience has shown that student teams often struggle to identify and organize information and to reach a group consensus about treatment. In this study we developed a survey tool for students to use during a simulation that provides a framework to organize thinking to decision making. The instrument was deployed on an iPad and required each student to first identify sources of information, to list problems requiring attention, to prioritize the problem list and to make a note of physiological rationale. Students could then discuss as group before proceeding to treatment decisions. Each item was followed by a self‐rating of confidence on a 7‐point Likert scale. Eighty out of 120 students gave informed consent for their data to be included in this IRB‐approved study. The most common errors were omission of key information, misconceptions of physiology and over‐treatment of the patient. Despite the prevalence of error students showed high levels of confidence, demonstrating an over‐confidence bias in their decision making. In conclusion the tool shows promise as a way to identify misconceptions in physiology and to reflect on errors in critical reasoning and decision making.Support or Funding InformationUCF College of Medicine, Medical Education GrantThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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