A college education is expected to improve students' critical thinking skills. Keeping students active in class--through writing activities and class discussion--has been shown to help students think critically. In this article, creative hands-on activities, which are common in engineering courses, are shown to improve students' critical thinking…

Capstone courses emphasize students' experiences and learning, rather than course content. This emphasis is consistent with principles and practices fundamental to humanistic education. Here we describe a capstone course, "Internship," that includes five features consistent with humanistic education: (1) student-centered learning, (2) empathic…

Argues that assignments requiring the student to write in a specific genre stimulate formation and retention of critical concepts about the genre. A classroom experiment compared the results of a sonnet-writing assignment with a traditional essay-writing assignment about sonnets, confirming the effectiveness of the experiential approach.…

Describes an undergraduate business course in organizational behavior in which students participated in experiential learning exercises linked to classroom conceptual learning, then reflected on the experiences in a written synthesizing statement. Examples of students' insights are provided. Advantages and disadvantages of the approach and…