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Abstract Critical thinking is a crucial component of effective learning, enabling students to comprehend, reflect, and apply their learning toward solving new problems. Although critical thinking could be used toward solving challenging problems, it is sometimes considered as a similar concept of ``challenging level'' among students and instructors. This study aims to investigate this similarity issue by evaluating students' opinions based on critical thinking, and challenging level of course assignments in computer and software engineering courses. Students are asked to rank each assignment based on how much each assignment stimulated their critical thinking, and how much it challenged them. Moreover, instructors provide their opinions about critical components of each course assignment for comparison and validation purposes. The t-tests were conducted on collected data from students and analysis results show that 50% of assignments on average are not significantly different from students' perspectives. The additional collected data on overall satisfaction with each course assignment indicates that students welcome the assignments with a higher degree of critical thinking rather than those that are more challenging.
Shirazi et al. (Sat,) studied this question.