The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) laboratory approach is a teaching and learning tool which combines writing, inquiry, collaboration and reflection, and provides scaffolding for the development of critical thinking skills. In this study, the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) was used to measure the critical thinking skills of first year general chemistry students who were instructed using the SWH approach and first year general chemistry students who received traditional (TRAD) laboratory instruction A quasi experimental pretest-posttest design involving the use of matched groups was used to assess differences in critical thinking between the two groups. Students in the SWH group had significantly higher total critical thinking scores over their traditional counterparts. The results indicate that the SWH approach shows efficacy in improving students' critical thinking skills over the traditional approach.

The development of proficiency in the practices used by scientists and engineers is considered an important student outcome of laboratory instruction. We developed tasks to assess students' use and development of selected scientific and engineering practices in the general chemistry laboratory using an adapted evidence-centered design approach. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the process of development and validation of these assessment tasks, using one of our tasks to illustrate the process. The tasks show strong evidence of validity and reliability for revealing students' understanding of scientific and engineering practices within the research context.

The Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) and the Science Writing and Workshop Template (SWWT) are two active learning instructional approaches which combine writing, inquiry, collaboration, and reflection, elements which have been associated with critical thinking development. In this study, we used a quasi-experimental pretest–post-test design to investigate the impact of the implementation of these two approaches on the critical thinking skills of first-year chemistry students, measured using the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST). The results indicate that implementation of the PLTL and the SWWT instructional strategies led to significantly higher gains in critical thinking.