It is the aim of a liberal education to develop students' intellectual and practical skills for use in the real world�one being critical thinking.  In chemistry, the most-valued dimension of critical thinking is scientific reasoning (SR): students' ability to examine data and make inferences about what the outcome is or should be.  This study examines students' SR skills in a chemistry course for non-science majors both with (treatment) and without (control) content-driven, inquiry-based classroom interventions. The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR), administered pre- and post-course, generated data describing the students' SR ability and growth in SR as a result of the course.  Interview data collected after the pretest with the control group reveals evidence regarding students' reasoning patterns. Constructivist theory guided this study, as students develop SR skills through experiences demanding skills related to proportional, probabilistic, correlational, hypothetico-deductive reasoning, control of variables, and mass/volume conservation.  Results describing SR growth in treatment and control groups will be presented along with in-depth explanations of students' reasoning patterns based upon their descriptions as they worked through the LCTSR.  Understanding SR growth can inform design of future classroom materials to improve both content knowledge and SR performance for non-majors science classes.

Investigating growth and patterns in scientific reasoning in a chemistry course for non-science majors

246th National Meeting (2013)

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