Impact of traditional physics lab instruction on students’ critical thinking skills in a Finnish context

Abstract

Recent studies have given incentives to physics departments around the world to revise the learning goals of their lab courses to emphasize experimentation skills over reinforcing lecture content. Evaluation instruments have been developed to measure the achievement of learning goals, and one such instrument is the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC). The PLIC measures respondents’ ability to evaluate models, evaluate methods, and to suggest the next steps for an investigation. In the present work, we give consideration to the validity of our Finnish translation of the PLIC and we show results from our baseline study of first-year introductory lab courses with labs mixing content- and skills-related learning goals. We observed no statistically significant change in students’ critical thinking skills over the period of our study.