Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

Problem-based leaming (PBL) is an increasingly popular curricular technique for developing academic and intellectual talent. Aligning PBL activities and subsequent student assessment often proves to be difficult for teachers, with many PBL activities followed by traditional, pencil-and-paper assessments. This misalignment confuses students by disrupting their understanding of teacher expectations. In this paper, we discuss the importance of instruction-assessment alignment during PBL and provide detailed examples of exemplary units.

Post-secondary students in the applied professions (e.g., business, education, psychology) often see the value of creativity to their future work, but have never had the opportunity to critically examine their assumptions about creativity. A more critically examined and substantiated understanding of creativity can go a long way in helping pre-professional students consider how creativity might be best applied and cultivated in their future professional work. The purpose of this article is to discuss how principles of critical thinking can be brought to bear on understanding creativity. First, a discussion of the importance of critically examining the basic assumptions surrounding creativity will be presented. Then, a pedagogical framework for incorporating critical thinking into the examination of creativity will follow. Finally, an example of how the model might: be used with post-secondary students will be presented, followed by a brief conclusion.