Metacognitive Awareness and Creative Thinking: the capacity to cope with uncertainty in engineering

International groups of stakeholders are currently involved in the redefinition of the objectives of engineering education. They are releasing different reports where clearly raise the need that the acquisition of cognitive skills and metacognitive awareness must be carried out complying with the knowledge, attitudes and values of the complex demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution framework. Inherited from the past, the stiffness of the academic structures in some higher education institutions, may prove today an insurmountable barrier to the new adaptable learning approaches required by Generation Z students. During this study, engineering students received creative thinking instruction to comply with the enhancement of: (i) their ability of shifting between different modes of thought; (ii) their capacity to cope with uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility; and (iii) their handling of non-routine interpersonal and analytical skills. The obtained results indicate that the supervised practice of associative and analytical thinking modes are highly effective for the development of the mode shifting competence, not only as a domain-specific but also as a domain-general thinking skill.