Teaching Critical Thinking Skills for the 21st Century: An Advertising Principles Case Study

Abstract

Business educators are being asked to prepare students for a rapidly changing world in which much business content becomes obsolete every few years. How can they prepare students to be lifelong learners capable of facing challenges as yet unspecified? The answer does not lie in a continually changing curriculum, but in one that prepares business graduates to change and to learn the things they need throughout life. An exciting approach to creating such a business graduate focuses on critical thinking skills. This article describes how a critical-thinking-skills approach can be used to teach any business course and illustrates this point with a case study of an advertising principles course.