Promoting Critical Thinking and Reasoning Skills (Online)

Active learning helps students retain and understand the course material more. However, active learning comes in many shapes and forms. To succeed in a science research environment, students must be able to critically think and analyze information daily. Traditional undergraduate exam questions do not cause students to think about the material in a critical way, or at least to the degree that would better prepare them to thrive in a research setting. Leading teaching sessions that include critical thinking invoking questions is a great way to get students to think about the material in a way they are not used to. It serves a few purposes aside from the obvious. 1) Students become much more engaged with the material because they see it as a “challenge” to answer the questions and begin competing with themselves. 2) It increases their confidence. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce other instructors to this method of teaching.