Fostering critical thinking through a service-learning, combined sewer analysis project in an undergraduate course in hydrologic engineering

Abstract

The ability to exercise engineering judgment and think critically when put into unfamiliar situations is important to graduating engineering students as they begin their careers. However, many engineering courses focus on teaching students the background information and fundamental principles for a topic, without adequately engaging students in activities that cultivate and reinforce critical thinking or easily relate to real-world engineering projects. The result is often that students may 'know' things about a topic, but are far less able to 'do' engineering work in that topic. Upon entering the workforce, students will find that the overarching problem is dealing with uncertainty: Information needed to solve the problem at hand is not neatly summarized in a question statement, and related textbook examples may not explicitly suggest the needed analytical procedure. How can instructors provide students the experience of 'doing' engineering work, and developing critical thinking at the university level that emulates the environment of real-world engineering practice? The application of servicelearning projects, which use the EFFECTs-based technique of an underlying driving question, may contribute to the development of both practice-based experience and critical thinking. In order to prepare undergraduate engineering students for the ill-defined, unfamiliar types of problems they will face after graduating, service-learning projects can be utilized to foster students' critical thinking through providing (a) a real-world context in which to solve engineering problems, (b) realistic data sources (including information that may be ambiguous, irrelevant, or incorrect), and (c) the industry-standard analytical and design software tools with which to integrate realistic information in solving the real-world problem. This paper presents the benefits of service-learning projects for emulating real-world engineering practice and it provides a profile of a service-learning project that combined elements of real-world engineering project and software tool utilization in order to perform a service learning project in the areas of hydraulic engineering and hydrology. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.