This longitudinal case-study aimed at examining whether purposely teaching for the promotion of higher order thinking skills enhances students' critical thinking (CT), within the framework of science education. Within a pre-, post-, and post-post experimental design, high school students, were divided into three research groups. The experimental group (n=57) consisted of science students who were exposed to teaching strategies designed for enhancing higher order thinking skills. Two other groups: science (n=41) and non-science majors (n=79), were taught traditionally, and acted as control. By using critical thinking assessment instruments, we have found that the experimental group showed a statistically significant improvement on critical thinking skills components and disposition towards critical thinking subscales, such as truth-seeking, open-mindedness, self-confidence, and maturity, compared with the control groups. Our findings suggest that if teachers purposely and persistently practice higher order thinking strategies for example, dealing in class with real-world problems, encouraging open-ended class discussions, and fostering inquiry-oriented experiments, there is a good chance for a consequent development of critical thinking capabilities.

Promotion of low order thinking skills such as memorization is inconsistent with the goal of contemporary education. The author presents the challenge to move away from teaching in a way that promotes low-level thinking and provides suggestions.

Both chemistry teachers and nonmajor students appear to agree that freshman chemistry may well be the most problematic traditional science discipline taught in the first year of college-as far as students' misunderstandings, learning dificulties, and misconceptions are concerned. The above is probably due to the many abstract, nonintujtive concepts, which are not directly interrelated. Consequently, in such cases, the powerful, general teaching strategy of "concept mapping" must be replaced by alternative, specific strategies. Selected illustrative examples of students' learning difficulties and misconceptions in freshman general and organic chemistry are presented in the students' terms, followed by the corresponding successfully applied, specific, concept-oriented, eclectic intervention strategies the author uses in order to overcome the difficulties. Based on longitudinal in-class observations, interpretive study, and analysis it is suggested that those students' misconceptions in freshman chemistry which are not interrelated logically and/or derived from one another are nor prone to the general "concept mapping" approach and should be dealt with by using the appropriate, specific teaching strategy.

The performance of freshman science, engineering, and in-service teacher students in three Israeli and American universities on algorithmic, lower-order cognitive skills (LOCS), and conceptual chemistry exam questions was investigated. The driving force for the study was an interest in moving chemistry instruction from an algorithm-oriented factual recall approach dominated by LOCS to a decision-making, problem-solving, and critical thinking approach dominated by higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS). Students' responses to the specially designed algorithmic, LOCS, and conceptual exam questions were scored and analyzed for correlations and for differences between the means within and across universities by the question's category. The main findings were: (1) students in all three universities performed consistently on each of the three categories in the order of algorithmic > LOCS > conceptual questions, (2) success on algorithmic does not imply success on conceptual, or even on LOCS questions, and (3) students taught in small classes outperformed by far those in large lecture sessions in all three categories. The implied paradigm shift from an algorithmic/LOCS to a conceptual/HOCS orientation should be moved from a research-based theoretical domain to actual implementation in order for a meaningful improvement of chemistry teaching to occur.