Encouraging students to repeatedly make decisions about data collected during introductory lab courses improves their critical thinking skills, report physicists.
Introductory labs are often seen as primarily “cookbook” exercises in which students simply follow instructions to confirm results given in their textbooks, while learning little.
In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists show that guiding students to autonomous, iterative decision making while carrying out common physics lab course experiments can significantly improve students’ critical thinking skills.
Pendulum Experiments
In the multiyear, ongoing study, the researchers followed first-year students in co-author Douglas Bonn’s introductory physics lab course at the University of British Columbia (UBC). They first established what students were, and were not, learning following the conventional instructional approach, and then systematically modified the instructions of some lab experiments to change how students think about data and their implications.
