Encouraging critical thinking in an interactive chemical engineering laboratory environment

Engineering educators are increasingly concerned that most engineering courses continue to emphasize "plugging and cranking" on well-defined, close-ended, numerical problems at the expense of helping students become better critical thinkers and engineering practitioners. As a result, in sharp contrast with other professions such as medicine and law, far too few engineering graduates are capable of immediately practicing engineering when they leave educational institutions. The Colorado School of Mines (USA) offers an intensive engineering operations laboratory designed to enhance students' higher order thinking skills and familiarity with engineering professional practice. In its present form, the course relies heavily on a constructivist approach using team-based, open-ended unit operations experiments. Here, the authors describe the course and present evidence that allowing students to "make meaning" of objective engineering knowledge helps enhance their ability to critically analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the results of their laboratory work.