Promoting Students' Critical Thinking Skills Using the Unit Operations Laboratory Experience

The unit operations laboratory represents an idea context for helping students improve their critical thinking skills if experiments, data analysis, and assessments are designed in ways that require students to go beyond routine data collection and reporting.  At the Colorado School of Mines, the unit operations laboratory is taught as an intensive 6-week summer session in which critical thinking (with a focus on higher-order thinking) is a key objective that students must demonstrate.  An analysis of student oral and written reports shows that students can progress from naïve “black-white” thinking through stages of multiplicity (“all explanations for the data are equally good”) to developing a reasonably sophisticated plausible explanation for explaining data trends but that the development takes weeks of intensive practice and feedback.  Techniques for promoting and monitoring this development will be discussed using examples of student work to illustrate the emergence of higher-order thinking skills as the course progresses.