Abstract
Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their written notebooks in an introductory physics laboratory course. We compared student behaviors in the Structured Quantitative Inquiry Labs (SQILabs) curriculum to a control group and evaluated the fragility of these behaviors through procedural cueing. We found that the SQILabs were generally effective at improving the quality of students' reasoning about data and making decisions from data. These improvements in reasoning and sensemaking were thwarted, however, by a procedural cue. We describe these changes in behavior through the lens of epistemological frames and task orientation, invoked by the instructional moves.
Highlights
A new curricular approach for introductory labs, the Structured Quantitative Inquiry Labs (SQILabs), aims to develop students’ quantitative critical thinking skills
We aimed to explore the effects of various elements of the SQILabs on students’ task orientation and epistemologies
There were no significant differences between the analysis choices of the control or SQILabs 1 group
Summary
A new curricular approach for introductory labs, the Structured Quantitative Inquiry Labs (SQILabs), aims to develop students’ quantitative critical thinking skills. We define critical thinking as the process through which one decides what to believe. In this context we focus on “believing” data, evidence, and models. Previous evaluation found that the SQILabs structure dramatically improves the fraction of students who reflect on their results from an experiment, iterate to improve their measurements, and evaluate disagreements between models and data [1,2]. We aimed to explore the effects of various elements of the SQILabs on students’ task orientation and epistemologies. We infer students’ task orientation and epistemologies from their experimentation behaviors in an unstructured lab activity
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