Integrating Critical Thinking in Teaching Engineering Subjects for Malaysian Technical Schools Lessons

Abstract

Critical thinking ability as one of the Higher-order thinking skills plays an important role in the development of an engineering student. A preliminary study done on Malaysian technical school teachers found that there is an issue in teaching it as a skill in lessons. Thus, a study was conducted to find out how to implement critical thinking to teach Engineering subjects in Malaysian Technical Schools. The focus was on how it should be infused into lessons and what skills students should exhibit. A qualitative approach under the case study design was utilized for this study. An open-ended semi-structured interview was conducted with six samples and was analyzed using the Miles & Huberman (1994) qualitative data analysis procedure. The result shows a need to create an environment that triggers critical thinking needs in lessons for implementation. There are also 15 abilities or constructs that can be exhibited by students to show that critical thinking is embedded in the lessons planned.