Critical thinking is defined as: the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment. Critical thinking has been categorized as one of the skills to have in order to be successful academically and professionally. Throughout their academic career, some students will compartmentalize the knowledge and/or and skills acquired, which could prevent them from using that knowledge when needed in a setting different from the one they acquired it or could fail to recognize that they have already acquired the knowledge and/or skills needed to solve the task at hand. In this report we are addressing the difficulties students display to translate theory to practice, which could be explained by a lack of activities targeting the enhancement of critical thinking. This phenomenon is well observed among STEM student and in this presentation we focused on Junior and Senior chemistry students taking instrumental analysis laboratory. To address the issue of critical thinking and knowledge compartmentalization, we designed a series of laboratory projects based on problem based learning to help promote students critical thinking in order to decompartmentalize knowledge and a rubric used to assess the students growth.<br/> <br/> <br/>

Designing food analysis experiments for the promotion of critical thinking in the instrumental analysis laboratory

254th National Meeting (2017)

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