Improving Critical Thinking in Software Development via Interdisciplinary Projects at a Most Diverse College

The software industry has been seeing a steady growth worldwide. However, the quality of the developed software is tightly related to the supply of skilled and capable software developers who are able to cope with many challenges and maintain a high level of critical thinking during the software development life cycle. Software skills are usually gained in upper level software development courses in undergraduate IT majors. We have been applying an active learning methodology for teaching critical thinking in the classroom. Our college is one of the most diverse colleges in the southeast region, which makes our classroom a good model of national diversity. In assessing critical thinking, the traditional and generic approach is to measure skills that are universal and subject-agnostic. In this study, we report that the universal skill assessment for software development is ineffective in measuring students? growth based on inconclusive testing results and a weak test-retest reliability score. We suspect that students were unmotivated by several factors, which includes students being passive listeners and the subject being unrelated to software. In addition, we report a significant potential for developing domain-specific critical thinking exercises and testing that could serve to train the students and to assess their skills at the same time. We would like to emphasize that our conclusion is independent of software development, and could be generalized to develop exercises for other subjects.