Enhancing critical and creative thinking in sustainability education through reflective practice and project-based learning

Business and management education increasingly positions critical and creative thinking as essential graduate capabilities. However, these skills are often framed as generic graduate attributes, with limited empirical attention to how they are developed and articulated within specific pedagogical and disciplinary contexts. This gap is particularly evident in undergraduate business courses focusing on sustainability, where complex and ill-defined challenges are assumed to foster higher-order thinking, yet students’ experiences of developing these skills remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining how undergraduate business students perceive and conceptualise the development of critical and creative thinking within a sustainability-focused capstone course. Guided by the research question How do undergraduate business students experience and articulate the development of critical and creative thinking through reflective and project-based learning in a sustainability context?, the study analyses reflective assessments completed by 178 final-year business students engaged in a team-based sustainability project aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A deductive thematic analysis was conducted using established frameworks of critical and creative thinking. The findings indicate that students readily identified and applied observable aspects of critical and creative thinking, particularly analysis, problem-solving, and innovation. In contrast, deeper metacognitive elements such as judgement, originality, and reflective evaluation were less consistently articulated. The study contributes discipline-specific evidence to management education research and highlights the importance of explicitly framing higher-order thinking skills and embedding structured reflective tasks within sustainability-focused assessments to support students’ ability to recognise and articulate critical and creative thinking.