Critical Thinking, Reflective Practice, and Adaptive Expertise in Engineering

This synthesis paper examines the concepts of critical thinking, reflective practice, and adaptive expertise as represented throughout academic literature. The academic community generally considers each of these skillsets to be desirable attributes of engineering graduates and practitioners. Despite the trend of engineering programs across the country to embrace critical thinking, reflective practices, and adaptive expertise through mission and vision statements, the development of these qualities through education may be falling short. Lack of explicit exposure to and discussion of each concept may be contributing to the common inability of engineering students and educators to effectively communicate their understanding of each. In an attempt to contribute to the improvement of the situation, this paper aims to provide an individual evaluation of each topic as represented in the literature, a review of current operationalization techniques, and the current state of each topic within the field of engineering. Additional discussion builds connections by exploring relationships among the three topics, considers issues related to the topics within engineering, and offers possible areas of future exploration.