T-CHAT Educational Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking based on use Cases in Software Engineering

Although critical thinking (CT) is one of the most important skills of the 21st-century, many higher education graduates lack this skill and many educators do not explicitly address it in their teaching. This study addresses the gap in teaching CT skills in software engineering by proposing an extension of the state-of-the-art T-CHAT educational approach that can be used for teaching engineering. This extension explicitly targets the development of CT in software engineering students and the ability to transfer it to other tasks and domains. This study presents teaching methods that are appropriate for teaching CT and embeds them into the T-CHAT learning/teaching process. An educational experiment was conducted in two modules in which this approach was implemented. The quasi-experimental research design with one-group pre-test–post-test was used. Quantitative data were collected in two student self-perception surveys at the beginning and the end of these modules. Nine paired responses were obtained from the students who took part in both surveys. This sample size was too small for any statistical conclusions to be drawn. Due to the small data sample (less than 10), single-subject research and its methods of data analysis were used: (1) chats were created to visually inspect the data, and (2) descriptive statistics were calculated for all scales of the CTSAS and SENCTDS questionnaires. The results of this study support the hypotheses that the proposed approach has a positive impact on the development of both students’ perceived CT skills and CT dispositions. Students perceived that their CT skills developed better that their CT dispositions. In addition, for most CT skills and dispositions, students’ responses were less dispersed in the post-survey than in the pre-survey, showing a reduction in the point estimate for standard deviation. This is a significant finding because it shows that the extended T-CHAT educational approach has led to more homogeneous perceptions of CT skills and dispositions across the student group. To summarize, the extended T-CHAT approach has been proven to promote the development of critical thinking, as demonstrated by the increase in students perceived critical thinking skills and dispositions.