“The Chocolate Conundrum” and Other Easy Active Learning Additions to Traditional Undergraduate Science Courses Designed to Teach for Critical Thinking

Abstract

The need for science students to acquire critical thinking skills during their undergraduate degree is clear, but how to ensure that they indeed develop these skills is still open for discussion. Here, we show that straightforward active learning components designed to teach for critical thinking can be added to a standard second-year analytical chemistry course and that they cause an increase in the critical thinking skills of the students. We analyze our data both quantitatively (using the Danczak-Overton-Thompson (DOT) test) and qualitatively (using student feedback). The course components designed to teach for critical thinking are an open-ended group exercise called “The Chocolate Conundrum”, self-reflection exercises for students to self-assess their critical thinking skills, and a group project designed to enable students to learn to critically review a peer-reviewed journal paper. By linking these components to established teaching theories and synthesizing current knowledge in the field into practical exercises that can be added to current science undergraduate courses, our work highlights how simple and innovative approaches for fostering critical thinking can have impactful outcomes. Students report greatly increased confidence in their critical thinking skills at the end of the course. We hope that our research shows the value of adding simple active learning components to current chemistry and science courses to explicitly teach for critical thinking.