Critical thinking and physics education

Abstract

Critical thinking is considered to be one of the most important skills which help us to solve problems, evaluate arguments, interpret information or make decisions in everyday life. Student use mind operations to learn accepted information and to recall this information after it has been learned, and he/she develop content/basic thinking. Using the critical thinking, student reorganize accepted information and using creative thinking he/she utilize that information to create new knowledge. Based on this information, students should solve the problems from everyday life whose solution requires critical thinking better than similar problems with physics content. We verified this hypothesis in survey using the test. In this survey we also tested if the level of critical thinking increases with the number of years of school attendance. Analysis, which include formation, identification and evaluation of arguments, also belongs between the cognitive skills of critical thinking. We were interested therefore how students formulate arguments. Using the physics problems with open-ended questions, we tested if the quality of arguments increases with the number of years of school attendance.