Critical thinking ability, open‐mindedness, and knowledge of the processes of science of chemistry and non‐chemistry students

Abstract

The Chemistry Curriculum Committee of the Philadelphia school district developed a chemistry course guide for use in the city's comprehensive high schools. Instruction based on this guide was intended, in part, to develop critical thinking ability, open‐mindedness, and knowledge of the processes of science. Critical thinking ability and open‐mindedness appears to have been developed; but only when pretesting was part of the teaching process. Knowledge of the processes of science has not been developed by students in chemistry classes following the Guide, perhaps because of a lack of strict adherence to the intent and content of the chemistry guide.

Developing Students’ Critical Thinking Skills by Task-Based Learning in Chemistry Experiment Teaching

“…So there are many approaches to improve students' critical thinking (e.g. Charen, 1970;Seymour, 1973;Zhou et al, 2010a;Zhou, Guo, & Wang, 2010b;Zhou, Shen, & Tian, 2010c;Zhou et al, 2012;Evren, Bati, & Yilmaz, 2012). For the literature mentioned above, most of the researches have focused on the influence that teaching methods had on critical thinking.…”

An empirical determination of concepts contributing to successful performance of a science process: A study of mineral classification

“…as a dependent measure in assessing the success of instruction (Seymour & Sutman, 1973;Macbeth, 1974;Wideen, 1975) and researched students abilities in using the processes of observation (Allen, 1971 ;Tomera, 1974aTomera, , 1974bZeitler, 1972)' inference and verification (Moliter & George, 1976)' hypothesis formulation (Pouler, 1980)' prediction (Theil & George, 1976), and classification (Allen, 1970;Chiapetta & Collette, 1975;Jacobs & Vandevanter, 1971;Johnson, 1973;Levin & Zipora, 1980;Lowell, 1979Lowell, , 1980Norwak, 1969;Popp & Raven, 1972).…”