Promoting critical thinking skills through debates in engineering education. A case study on manufacturing.

Abstract

Argumentation and decision-making are fundamental in the training of industrial engineers to effectively develop their critical thinking skills. Despite this, engineering education focuses on technical aspects that hardly promote the development of these skills in the classroom. To promote them, a specific training programme in critical thinking for industrial engineers was proposed, which, among other activities, included short debates on socio-scientific problems. This paper presents the impact of a debate on manual versus mass production on 30 students of the Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering at the University of Malaga (Spain) acting as listeners. To assess this impact, we analyse the argued decisions made by the listeners about the problem before and after the activity, finding that the initial position of the majority was manual manufacturing based on social evidence, and the final position was mass production based on scientific-technical evidence such as economic aspects or the quality of the manufactured product. The arguments used by the debaters were scientifically vague but had an essential effect on changing decisions, especially the evidence used, which the listeners made their own