• Open Access

Evaluating instructional labs’ use of deliberate practice to teach critical thinking skills

Emily M. Smith and N. G. Holmes
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 16, 020150 – Published 4 December 2020
An article within the collection: Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

Abstract

The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The scheme has three components: (1) that critical thinking is a context-dependent process for using critical thinking skills to make evidence-based decisions (2) that to make decisions one must have agency and (3) that deliberate practice can be used to effectively teach critical thinking skills. We use this scheme to evaluate the lab instructions for three sets of instructional labs for their use of deliberate practice for teaching critical thinking skills through varied opportunities for students to exercise agency in making decisions about experiments. Our analysis shows that our curricular design did target the experimentation-focused critical thinking skills, but did not strongly align with theoretical recommendations for deliberate practice. The results provide suggestions for improvements to curricular design. For curriculum developers, instructors, and researchers who intend to teach critical thinking in the context of experimental physics, this scheme serves as a tool to create and evaluate lab instructions in terms of the ways in which specific skills are supported through deliberate practice.

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  • Received 2 July 2019
  • Accepted 21 November 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020150

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Physics Education Research

Collections

This article appears in the following collection:

Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

A special collection on theory and design of curriculum.

Authors & Affiliations

Emily M. Smith1,2 and N. G. Holmes1

  • 1Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado 80401, USA

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Issue

Vol. 16, Iss. 2 — July - December 2020

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