This paper is inspired by the widely accepted need to develop critical thinking in physics students and teachers. More specifically, it is focused on the development of a critical attitude in prospective physics teachers. The question of a possible interplay between the development of conceptual comprehension and that of a critical attitude prompted us to conduct a series of investigations with teachers at the end of their preparation. The goal of this paper is to provide a synthesis of five previously published papers on this topic in order to inform discussion about teacher preparation. Each investigation is centered on a particular aspect of physics, and all are based on in-depth interviews with different participants. We focus on prospective teachers' "intellectual dynamics," that is, the way their comprehension of nonobvious topics and their critical attitudes evolve during these interviews, taking into account metacognitive and affective aspects such as intellectual satisfaction and self-esteem. We characterize several types of intellectual dynamics: "early critique," "delayed critique," "unstable critique," and "expert anesthesia" and provide information on their frequency. An overall conclusion is that in this type of context, that is, a guided intellectual pathway of about an hour, the development of conceptual comprehension and critical attitude are most often deeply entangled. We discuss the implications of these results for future research and we advocate new objectives and strategies for physics teachers' preparation.

This research documents the impact of a teaching interview aimed at developing a critical attitude in students, and focused on a particular topic: radiocarbon dating. This teaching interview is designed to have students react to limited written explanations of the phenomenon under study, and to express their possible frustration or intellectual satisfaction in relation to these texts. We aim to document the possible link between students' developing conceptual understanding of a topic and their ability to express their frustration when presented with very incomplete explanations, or their intellectual satisfaction when presented with complete explanation. As a side product we intend to observe some of their a priori ideas concerning this topic. Ten teaching interviews conducted with fourth-year university students were recorded, transcribed and coded. Beyond a series of results concerning students' a priori understanding of the domain, the analysis of the interviews suggests that, when students are presented with texts of increasing completeness and discuss these with the interviewer, their critical reactions evolve in time in a very specific way. We propose a tentative model for this co-evolution of student conceptual command and critical stance. The discussion bears on possible interpretations for the "anesthesia of judgment" observed in most students at the beginning of the interview, and for a few of them throughout the discussion. Keeping in mind the "competence vs concepts" current alternative, the conditions that seem to free students' critical potential are analysed in relation to their evolving command of the topic and their degree of intellectual satisfaction.

In a context of strong valuation of competences in physics teaching, students' critical thinking is widely advocated but there is also a risk that conceptual structuring be disregarded. For that reason, this investigation is focused on possible links between the development of critical attitude and conceptual understanding. We analyzed in detail how conceptual comprehension and critical attitude develop when a person confronts various explanations of a nonobvious topic. To this end, we conducted a fine grained analysis of five prospective teachers' critical and conceptual development during a one hour and a half interaction with an expert. This investigation completes a series of three previous studies addressing the same general research question in respect of three different physics topics. In this instance, the focus is on the topic of osmosis. A content analysis led us to identify some lines of reasoning that we expected to observe as well as conceptual targets for the interviews. In line with an integrative perspective, these conceptual goals provide some opportunities to link osmosis phenomena with a molecular approach. The transcripts were processed following two lines of analysis, one conceptual and the other focusing on critical attitude as well as metacognitive and affective affects. The findings confirm the significant occurrence of the expected lines of reasoning. They also suggest that students need to reach a threshold of comprehension, beyond logical necessity, before expressing critiques toward inaccurate texts or their previous views ("delayed critique"). Students' questions about the meanings of current phrases relating to pressure in liquids are shown to play a decisive role to activate their potential of critique as well as significant conceptual steps forward. In discussing our results, we explain how this study contributes to a holistic picture of student teachers' conceptual and critical co-development when interacting with an expert. The prevalence of "delayed critiques" aligns with our previous results. Additionally, a more specific finding of this study is the precise localization of events that are likely to trigger rapid conceptual and critical evolution. A discussion about further research and perspectives concerning the teaching of osmosis and students' formation to critique ends the paper.

One key objective of physics teaching is the promotion of conceptual understanding. Additionally, the critical faculty is universally seen as a central quality to be developed in students. In recent years, however, teaching objectives have placed stronger emphasis on skills than on concepts, and there is a risk that conceptual structuring may be disregarded. The question therefore arises as to whether it is possible for students to develop a critical stance without a conceptual basis, leading in turn to the issue of possible links between the development of conceptual understanding and critical attitude. In an in-depth study to address these questions, the participants were seven prospective physics and chemistry teachers. The methodology included a ‘teaching interview’, designed to observe participants’ responses to limited explanations of a given phenomenon and their ensuing intellectual satisfaction or frustration. The explanatory task related to the physics of how a survival blanket works, requiring a full and appropriate system analysis of the blanket. The analysis identified five recurrent lines of reasoning and linked these to judgments of adequacy of explanation, based on metacognitive/affective (MCA) factors, intellectual (dis)satisfaction and critical stance. Recurrent themes and MCA factors were used to map the intellectual dynamics that emerged during the interview process. Participants’ critical attitude was observed to develop in strong interaction with their comprehension of the topic. The results suggest that most students need to reach a certain level of conceptual mastery before they can begin to question an oversimplified explanation, although one student’s replies show that a different intellectual dynamics is also possible. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and for decisions concerning teaching objectives and the design of learning environments.