Promoting Critical Thinking Skills Through a Capstone Course

Students must be taught to think critically, communicate, and work together effectively. If students are to become disciplined thinkers, they need to do a good deal of active thinking to take ownership of the content they are learning. Learning to think well requires many opportunities for practice in thinking through problems and issues, and applying concepts to real life experiences. This paper provides some critical thinking techniques and suggests that in a capstone course using the multi-stage approach encourages students to think more critically.