A seven-question based critical thinking framework for cultivating innovation talents in engineering research and its implementation perspectives

The ability of research innovation is particularly important in the era of rapidly changing environment, challenges, and demands, where new knowledge, technologies, and unseen problems are emerging at an unprecedented speed. Engineering college students, especially postgraduate research students are well-trained with domain knowledge and technical skills to solve commonly known problems. However, the lack of a systematic critical thinking framework on research innovation prevents them from generating creative ideas, dealing with changes and new problems, and making step forward and groundbreaking innovations during their research program. This paper presents a seven-question based critical thinking framework, named “IDEA” catechism, which was proposed and implemented as a research training methodology in a research group at a Chinese higher education institution. Through the questions and answers (Q&A) process in the framework, engineering students can be better trained to deeply understand and critically scrutinize their research ideas and methods, and are eventually able to independently develop their own innovative ideas, especially leading them to do original study. The research group has been practicing this framework for several years and succeeded in developing a large number of distinctive innovation with national and international recognition, which were also collected as research cases.