Evaluation of Critical Thinking in Online Software Engineering Teaching: A Systematic Mapping Study

Critical thinking consists in analysing and evaluating the coherence of reasoning. This ability is crucial when we talk about software quality (SQ). SQ is closely related with the engineer’s ability to judge and discriminate between solutions correctly, so students are required to analyse, evaluate and draw conclusions. Critical thinking, therefore, becomes a crucial part of the training of software engineers. The problem arises from the diversity of proposals and the lack of rigour in existing experiences, making it difficult to find specific recommendations, especially in online contexts. This article reports a systematic mapping study (SMS), the purpose of which was to detect, organise and characterise specific dimensions in online teaching-learning of critical thinking for software engineering. Based on the results of the SMS, we propose a preliminary framework for the evaluation of critical thinking in the training of software engineers in a context of online higher education. It is expected that this proposal will serve as a basis for instructors of the discipline when evaluating critical thinking in a context of online teaching.