Critical thinking development in physics courses by PBL in virtual collaboration environments

Abstract

This research comprises the design of a strategy to develop critical thinking skills throughout the physics courses in engineering careers, trough collaborative work, problem-based learning (PBL) and virtual classroom interactions. To know any student’s development level and propose improvements to the learning strategy, an evaluation instrument is applied, seeking to increase the learning effectiveness before the course has finished. In various research stages a mixture of quantitative, qualitative, and inductive-deductive methods is used. An open-end questions instrument is adapted to show the initial and final critical thinking skills from the students. This didactic instrument focuses on developing critical thinking trough the usage of collaborative work to solve problems in virtual classrooms. The results shown that students demonstrate cognitive skills that allowed them to find the right solutions based on analysis and inference with various proceedings.