Ac 2010-1518: Refining a Critical Thinking Rubric for Engineering

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology in 2000 revised accreditation criteria to require program assessment according to eleven outcomes that all require critical thinking skills. Critical thinking can be incorporated into engineering classes in a variety of ways including writing assignments, active learning strategies, project-based design experiences, and course redesign. Clearly, accurately and consistently assessing critical thinking across engineering courses is challenging. In 2007 the University of Louisville selected the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework for use in all undergraduate courses. However, few assessments have been developed using the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework. Assessment of the ABET outcomes and assessment of critical thinking can be often be accomplished most effectively using rubrics. ABET defines a rubric as a set of categories developed from the performance criteria that define and describe progression toward meeting the components of work being completed, critiqued, or assessed. A holistic rubric assesses student work across multiple criteria as a whole while an analytic rubric assesses student work on each component of the assignment. Many papers have emphasized the importance of critical thinking in engineering programs and even more demonstrate the use of rubrics for assessing the ABET outcomes. Moreover, rubrics are available that assess critical thinking in engineering and different rubrics are available that assess critical thinking using the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework. However, no rubric, either holistic or analytic, was found that assessed critical thinking in engineering education using the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework. The literature on assessing critical thinking in engineering and rubrics for critical thinking will be summarized and it shows that accurately and consistently assessing critical thinking across engineering courses is challenging. The process for developing and validating a holistic critical thinking rubric, based on the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework, created for use in engineering education courses as part of a longitudinal educational research project will be explained. The rubric, developed through a professional collaboration of individuals with expertise in the discipline of engineering and those with expertise in rubric development, will be described and the challenges in training faculty to use it will be explained. Initial validation of the engineering specific critical thinking rubric was done by engineering faculty using the rubric to assess an artifact from a first year Introduction to Engineering course. This process is described highlighting the importance of inter-rater reliability, uniform application of the rubric to critical thinking artifacts in all courses that are part of the longitudinal critical thinking assessment, and helping faculty understand the differences in grading an artifact and rating it according to the rubric.