Teaching Critical Thinking in the physics classroom: High school students think about antimatter

Abstract

Teaching students the skills that they need for everyday life like Critical Thinking (CT) is the goal of education. Embedding Critical Thinking skills within a content-specific instruction is expected to improve students’ critical-thinking skills. In this article, we present our content-specific instructional design for promoting students’ critical-thinking skills. The target group comprises German high school students of grades 11 and 12. The specific topic of learning modules is antimatter. To design the instruction, we combined the model of “First Principles of Instruction” with our domain-specific interpretation of Halpern’s general definition of Critical Thinking skills. To develop and optimize our instructional design, we use Design-Based Research cycle.