Critical thinking is embedded in national university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies' statements on higher education. At the same time, there are tensions surrounding critical thinking in higher education, such as its commodification, Eurocentrism, and relationship to rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing from the…

Contributing to a scientific field is not always a scenic route. One cannot always act in the world according to the posted signs others have thought constituted relevant information. In doing so, one would prevent itself from taking uncharted roads with possibly much to discover. This autoethnographic journey of a didactician of mathematics tells…

Through the experience both in the classroom and travels, the author comes to define the key aspects of critical thinking (CT) as "individual skills that facilitate logical and informed decisions." Beyond personal anecdotes, scientifically, the import of CT has been shown in many walks of life (see, e.g., Bauwens and Gerhard [1987]).…

This article discusses language comprehension and developing skills with emergent readers, in particular verbal reasoning and language structures, that are necessary for later reading comprehension.

To emphasize to learners how factors outside individual control impact health, scholars introduced the concept of structural competency. Structural competency refers to the development of analytical skills that reveal the larger societal context beyond the patient-clinician interaction that shapes health outcomes. The growing adoption of…

Today's students are motivated to understand the world around them, and in so doing, they question things that their professors take for granted. Students are naturally drawn to question the world around them, and as they do so, they are developing frameworks to better organize their questions and the answers. The author understands that students…

Over the course of training, physicians develop significant knowledge and expertise. We review dual-process theory, the dominant theory in explaining medical decision making: physicians use both heuristics from accumulated experience (System 1) and logical deduction (System 2). We then discuss how the accumulation of System 1 clinical experience…

The ability to compose music must be taught and practiced. Students need purposeful opportunities to develop their musical thinking. This article presents a number of games and playful work that teachers can use to develop musical thought and lead toward intentional composition.

In this laboratory experiment, first-semester organic chemistry students use mechanistic reasoning to propose possible outcomes for the reaction of vanillin isobutyrate with a hydride source. The students subsequently run the reaction, isolate the product, and acquire its infrared spectrum. The experiment provides students with the opportunity to…

This article describes central tenets for design thinking and entrepreneurial thinking individually, then examines their intersection to analyze a product's feasibility in the market. The conceptual framework of combining design and entrepreneurial thinking can foster novelty in design, and also provides a means of extending instruction in the…

Political Science is a relatively new subject in the Mauritian academic context. As a small island developing state located in the Indian Ocean, it has many interesting features from which to draw to teach the discipline. These features include the ethnic and cultural diversity of its population; the island's political stability in a geographical…

How we should teach mathematics has long been debated by advocates of different instructional approaches. These debates can lead to tensions that are difficult to navigate for those who are new to (or even veterans of) the profession. Educators often propose a "balance" of different approaches as a solution. Charles Munter considers…

Teachers use instructional design to solve problems and creatively develop and implement various concepts, theories, and techniques to design and manage the elements of teaching and learning and assess learning outcomes that are generally accepted according to Bloom's taxonomy, in which the cognitive domains of lower-order thinking connect to…

Mark Creager noticed that how we teach students to reason mathematically may be counter-productive to our teaching goals. Sometimes a linear approach, focusing on sub-processes leading to a proof works well. But not always. Students should be made aware that reasoning is not always a straight forward process, but one filled with false starts and…

This essay explores the nuanced impact of generative AI technologies on management and business education, framed through three paradoxes: the "Expertise Paradox" suggests that AI's adequate performance at lower-level tasks may weaken students' development of higher-level thinking; the "Innovation Paradox" states that AI's…