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In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question 'What do you understand by mathematical creativity?'. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that 'problem solving' category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were 'involving mathematics' category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for 'problem solving' and 'involving mathematics' categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees.

Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students' training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments' examples, and the constant teacher's monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it.

In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question 'What do you understand by mathematical creativity?'. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that 'problem solving' category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were 'involving mathematics' category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for 'problem solving' and 'involving mathematics' categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students’ training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments’ examples, and the constant teacher's monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]