A Comparison of Methods for Teaching Critical Thinking Skills for U.S. Army Officers

Abstract

The U.S. Army has been conducting a variety of management education programs for commissioned officers. In both its traditional and its new distance education programs, the Army has established a goal of improving critical thinking and reasoning skills among its students to prepare its future leaders and managers more effectively for the challenges of the twenty-first century. For both the distance learning and the traditional education programs, the successful promotion of critical reasoning and thinking skills appeared to be among the most critical factors in directly or indirectly predicting student satisfaction with instruction, overall training, and usefulness or relevance of training. Distance education formats proved at least as, if not more, successful on a variety of comparison measures with traditional classroom formats when evaluated by field grade student officers. By logical extension, distance education can be expected to be a useful approach for teaching critical thinking skills for civilian management and leadership training programs.