Interdisciplinary critical and design thinking

Despite the importance of design thinking, there has been little research on interdisciplinary augmentation and the cleararticulation of cognitive domain effects is still missing. The present study explores students’ perceptions of and experiences incritical thinking and students’ creative design ability in different study disciplines and explores correlations between students’attitudes and beliefs towards critical thinking and their design thinking ability. A sample of 268 students aged 21–23 years wascollected. The students’ majors include preservice technology and engineering teachers’ education, chemical engineering, electricaland computer engineering, and mechanical engineering. For all subjects, critical thinking and design thinking are consideredimportant interdisciplinary capabilities. Our findings suggest that the students’ critical thinking might markedly affect their creativedesign ability. The ways in which each discipline is taught can be transferred across different knowledge and skill domains. Wefound that the most creative designers are mechanical engineering students, especially in terms of the originality and usefulness ofdesign, while their divergent thinking ability might be improved with methods used in technology and engineering teachereducation. Electrical and computer engineering students can benefit when interdisciplinary methods for improving understandingare applied as evidenced by the chemical and mechanical engineering curriculum. We also suggest that female students, whodominate in divergent thinking and critical thinking, might improve team learning and decision-making where transferable skillscan be enhanced along with pedagogical content knowledge. These findings have implications for interdisciplinary innovationlearning and creative design assessment.