Treffer: Creating Environments for Critical Thinking: Building Upon Multiple Choice Problems in Electrical Engineering Education.

Fostering critical thinking is an important part of any course design in Engineering education. It needs deliberate attention, and the implemented interventions must be routinely monitored and assessed. The need for analysis skills is prominent in a wide range of lower division and upper division engineering courses. One course in particular that requires strong critical thinking ability is the analog circuit course in which students learn about nonlinear circuit elements such as diodes, bipolar junction transistors, field effect transistors and their applications in designing functional circuits. Electrical and Computer Engineering students taking the course are required to make logical assumptions about the operation of these circuit elements and justify their assumptions based on the calculated results. Students struggle with analyzing the networks with a combination of these nonlinear circuit elements and relating them to the design of functional circuits as it demands a higher level of understanding. In this paper, we present a study of the impact on student learning when integrating take-home tests, peer instruction, pre-lecture videos, and guided quizzes in a lower division analog circuits course. The goal of these interventions was to improve critical thinking, essential for all engineering students, and to improve student mastery of course learning outcomes, among electrical and computer engineering students. This study ran through the Winter and Spring quarters in 2018. Survey data were collected at three points throughout both quarters to monitor the students' perception of the interventions and the effectiveness of the techniques. In addition to the survey data, students' responses to the challenging and authentic problems on the midterm and final exams and their grades were used to assess the effectiveness of the implemented techniques in improving critical thinking skills and to make changes to the design of the course at the end of the first offering of the redesigned course. According to our results, 86% of the students found the take-home tests effective in developing a profound understanding of the course topics in the second quarter. Compared to the student responses in the first quarter in which 65% of the participants mentioned that to be able to solve exam problems, they must have seen a similar circuit beforehand, in the second quarter 69% agreed that they can solve a circuit problem without seeing a similar problem beforehand. The survey findings, alongside an analysis of student exam grades, provide strong evidence that the implemented interventions have supported the development of problem-solving and critical thinking skills among Electrical and Computer Engineering students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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