improving students’ critical and creative thinking: a five-year study of teaching and learning...

Improving students’ critical and creative thinking TH!NK

A five-year study of teaching and learning 2014-2019

Meredith DavisProfessor, Graphic and Industrial DesignCollege of Design / North Carolina State University


North Carolina State University

34,000 students - 24,000 undergraduates - 2300 facultyResearch extensive, doctoral granting universityScience and technology focus - 12 colleges

Accreditation by the Southern Association of Collegesand Schools


Fundamental change in contemporary problem solvingand the nature of work

Counting-and-measuring culture in US schools leaves students unprepared as they enter college

University surveys: sophomores overly confident, seniors grateful, alumni 3-5 years after graduation not so sure

Faculty: critical and creative thinking #1 priority

Faculty: across disciplines and begin with freshmen year

Faculty: most faculty are unprepared to teach these skills


Charge to the faculty committee:

Improve undergraduate students’ higher-orderthinking competencies, including criticalevaluation, creative thinking, and reflection on their own thinking.

Develop strategies for scaling this work across disciplines in the university.


Critical thinking is the active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or form of knowledge, the grounds that support it, and the conclusions that follow. It involves analyzing and evaluating one’s own thinking and that of others.

• Raising vital questions and problems and formulating them clearly and precisely

• Gathering and assessing relevant information

• Reaching well-reasoned conclusions and testing them

against appropriate criteria and standards

• Openly considering alternative systems of thought or points of view

• Effectively communicating to others the analysis of questions and/or proposal for solutions to problems


Creative thinking is generating new ideas within or across domains of knowledge, drawing upon or intentionally breaking with established symbolic rules and procedures. It involves bringing together existing ideas into new configurations, developing new properties or possibilities for something that already exists, or discovering or imagining something entirely new.

• Analyzing and evaluating information/context in order to frame the problem scope

• Synthesizing information and generating multiple solutions to the problem

• Exercising insight about alternatives and choosing a

solution

• Evaluating the worth and consequences of an implemented solution

• Elaborating in convincing modes of communication to share ideas with others


Phase 1: Freshmen in General Education Beginning Biology Beginning Chemistry English Composition First-year Inquiry History Introduction to Engineering Introduction to Management Literature

Sample: 2231 students True freshmen entering the university from 2014-2016


Phase 2: Vertical curricular integration in selected university majors Accounting Communication Design Studies Foreign Languages Horticulture Industrial Engineering Microbiology Science Education Textile Engineering

Sample: Freshman through senior courses 2016-2019 cohorts


Faculty-designed creative activity using a common rubric

Student self-reflection that accompanies the rubric activity

Critical Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) developed by Tennessee Tech University

Scenario-based Visual, verbal, and numerical Faculty scored Pre- and post-semester Freshmen re-tested as seniors Access to TTU research data and training


Faculty development:

One-week training program under theinstruction of a director and four facultyfellows

Hands-on learning in strategies Day-by-day faculty evaluations

Pre-semester meeting for peer-to-peerreview of faculty-authored activities

Participation in scoring the CAT

Participating faculty + Paid for a weekend Two-semester commitment by 76 faculty


Construct an annotated bibliography describing why you selected the sources, how credible/biased you think they are, whether they conflict in opinion, and how you resolved that conflict in your thinking about the project.

Choose an audience and a communication format fromthe options provided. Justify your choice of format for the audience you chose.

Construct a concept map that shows the relationships among factors associated with the disease (biological, historical, cultural, etc.)

Create communication that educates your audience about the infectious disease and how it is transmitted.

Dr. Susan Carson

OUTBREAK!!!!

Freshman microbiologyassignment on aninfectious disease


Student video on polio using fast-forward mode in iMovie

Creating concept maps inspired me to consider every aspect of a particular issue and to then transform that parts- thinking into system- thinking, provingto be extremely useful in a Life Cycle Analysis class I am in.

Being presented with scenarios that asked us to choose which action was most important...sponsored critical thinking about what decisions were simultaneously ethically-, logically- , and economically- sound and what impact those decisions might have on stakeholders. It also taught me to deeply consider all angles of an approach when tackling an issue.

Jacqueline Welles


Findings to date:

Statistically significant improvement on the CAT by end of course

no longitudinal data yet - will compare single course cohorts with students in vertical integration curricula who have repeated exposure

Greatest gains in large lecture classes

No faculty difficulties in using the rubric - archived sample activities

Student reflection proved valuable to the project and to faculty

Most faculty extended the use of strategies to courses not in the study

High demand for training from non-study faculty

Improving students’ critical and creative thinking TH!NKhttps://think.dasa.ncsu.eduSue Carson, [email protected]