Teaching critical thinking

Abstract

The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and although it is an important goal of education, that goal is seldom being achieved. We argue that the key element for developing this ability is repeated practice in making decisions based on data, with feedback on those decisions. We demonstrate a structure for providing suitable practice that can be applied in any instructional setting that involves the acquisition of data and relating that data to scientific models. This study reports the results of applying that structure in an introductory physics laboratory course. Students in an experimental condition were repeatedly instructed to make and act on quantitative comparisons between datasets, and between data and models, an approach that is common to all science disciplines. These instructions were slowly faded across the course. After the instructions had been removed, students in the experimental condition were 12 times more likely to spontaneously propose or make changes to improve their experimental methods than a control group, who performed traditional experimental activities. The students in the experimental condition were also four times more likely to identify and explain a limitation of a physical model using their data. Students in the experimental condition also showed much more sophisticated reasoning about their data. These differences between the groups were seen to persist into a subsequent course taken the following year.critical thinking | scientific reasoning | scientific teaching | teaching experimentation | undergraduate education A central goal of science education is to teach students to think critically about scientific data and models. It is crucial for scientists, engineers, and citizens in all walks of life to be able to critique data, to identify whether or not conclusions are supported by evidence, and to distinguish a significant effect from random noise and variability. There are many indications of how difficult it is for people to master this type of thinking, as evidenced by many societal debates. Although teaching quantitative critical thinking is a fundamental goal of science education, particularly the laboratory portion, the evidence indicates this is seldom, if ever, being achieved (1-6). To address this educational need, we have analyzed the explicit cognitive processes involved in such critical thinking and then developed an instructional design to incorporate these processes.We argue that scientists engage in such critical thinking through a process of repeated comparisons and decisions: comparing new data to existing data and/or models and then deciding how to act on those comparisons based on analysis tools that embody appropriate statistical tests. Those actions typically lead to further iterations involving improving the data and/or modifying the experiment or model. In a research settin...

Introductory physics labs: We can do better

“…The goal is to develop students' quantitative critical thinking skills, 7 defined as the ability to use data to test and evaluate models, explanations, and methods. Students must therefore understand experimental uncertainty and its implications in such tests.…”

“…They connect the quality of the data collected to the depth of the physics that can be explored. 7 Students in SQILabs also retained that physics thinking in their lab course the following year, despite its traditional, highly structured design. By contrast, the more traditional version of the lab experiment would not yield data of sufficient precision for the students to discern the second-order behavior; any discrepancies would be routinely dismissed as "human error," and if they wondered about a possible discrepancy, they would have no time to go back and examine it.…”

Value added or misattributed? A multi-institution study on the educational benefit of labs for reinforcing physics content

“…There is much research demonstrating the effectiveness of labbased pedagogies at developing skills such as evaluating data and models, dealing with uncertainty and variability in data, and designing experiments [45][46][47][48][49][50].…”

“…In the second instance of the lab course, lab activities were redesigned to also include learning goals associated with critical thinking, data analysis, and experimental design as in Ref. [45]. There was a third course in the sequence (light and heat) that was not examined in this study.…”

Measuring the impact of introductory physics labs on learning and critical thinking

“…The redesign was inspired by an introductory lab framework that has students reflect on their data and results and use that reflection to iterate to improve their results or knowledge of a system [8][9][10]. Through this iterative experimentation process, students were seen to engage more deeply with the physical and measurement models involved in experimentation [11], even leading them to reexamine the assumptions about the system and refine physical models seen in lecture, based on their measurements.…”