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Employing Socratic Pedagogy to Improve Engineering Students’ Critical Reasoning Skills: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

Abstract

Engineering faculty agree almost universally that the development of students’ higher- order intellectual or cognitive abilities is one of the most important educational tasks of engineering programs. These abilities underpin our students’ perceptions of the world and the consequent decisions they make. Specifically, critical thinking (critical intelligence) – the capacity to probe and evaluate skillfully, analytically and fairly the quality of evidence, formulas, precepts and pieces of received wisdom that too often go unexamined and unchallenged and detect inaccuracies, error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias – is central to both personal success and national needs. This paper assumes that the capacity of undergraduate engineering students to learn to apply good reasoning to problem solutions can be nurtured and developed by an educational process aimed directly at developing students’ critical thinking skills.

More specifically, the paper reports on the judicious and amiable use of the Socratic Method of teaching by systematic questioning – instead of teaching by telling – to emphasize and foster critical reasoning skills in electrical engineering, computer engineering and engineering physics undergraduate students at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, California). The selective, careful use of the Socratic Method (in combination with traditional lectures and active learning exercises) in electrical circuits, linear systems, signal processing, probability and statistics, electronic communications, and senior capstone design project courses, teaching laboratories and projects helped improve student participation, got the students actively involved and excited about the projects and the material being taught, motivated the students to better master course content and taught the students to learn to think and reason more clearly, accurately, relevantly, logically, rationally, ethically and responsibly.

This paper discusses how the judicious, sensible and affable use of the Socratic Method in the aforementioned educational settings facilitated the development of students who are learning to possess the basic skills of thought and reasoning such as the ability to: identify, formulate and clarify questions; gather relevant data; identify key assumptions; identify the sources of the data and assumptions, and evaluate the relevancy and accuracy of the data and assumptions; identify and trace significant implications of the data and assumptions; consider alternative explanations without distortion or self-deception; and reason to logical, rational, responsible and ethical conclusions and decisions.

The Socratic Method does not always work in all contexts nor for all students, but it can be effective for most students most of the time. The paper discusses how the Method was used to integrate questioning and learning in the aforementioned courses, laboratories and projects to stimulate and challenge students, to assist them to acquire knowledge, and to help students discipline their mind by developing intellectual skills and traits of mind such as intellectual acuity, intellectual honesty, intellectual humility, intellectual

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Golanbari, M., & Garlikov, R. (2008, June), Employing Socratic Pedagogy To Improve Engineering Students’ Critical Reasoning Skills: Teaching By Asking Instead Of By Telling Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3359