Develop critical thinking through guided inquiry and jigsaw: An exploratory study in an engineering course

Abstract

Faced with a world of accelerating changes that seem uncontrollable, the survival of future generations is being challenged and have pushed higher education institutions to comply with the recurrent recommendations of international education bodies to include Critical Thinking and soft skills in the curricula. This article intends to contribute to empirical research on active strategies of teaching and learning that promote the development of Critical Thinking Based on a biannual pedagogical intervention in a class of first-year students of a mechanical engineering degree course, the objective of this article was to reflect to what extent an integrated pedagogical strategy that articulates Guided inquiry and the method of Cooperative Learning “Jigsaw” can promote capacities and dispositions of critical thinking. The results obtained point out to the potential of this combined strategy in the acquisition of knowledge, in the development of better questioning, analyzing evaluating and synthesizing information and in an improvement of the self-confidence and curiosity dispositions.