Abstract:

In the context of science education, the relationship between the skills that constitute the critical thinking construct and the processes involved in scientific practice is clear. Conscious and intentional use of thinking skills is essential to elaborate hypotheses that will later be confirmed or refuted based on the analysis of evidence and the application of knowledge; as well as to draw conclusions from the results obtained and base them with good arguments. In this sense, laboratory courses are the propitious space for the development of critical thinking skills, however, the design of lab work sessions often follows a standard structure in which the opportunities for the student to apply his thinking skills are few. Higher order thinking skills are essential in any educational level but teaching them is not an easy task. It is necessary that an adequate planning of these skills learning be incorporated as an important and explicit component in the training process of the students. On the other hand, the current health emergency has meant that educational institutions have had to adapt to the virtual or distance modality, including laboratory courses. In the case of chemistry laboratories, there has been discussion for some time about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of resources for the virtual laboratory modality, and there is a relatively large tendency to consider that there are more disadvantages in the case of virtual mode. This paper reports the results of the implementation of a reasoning skills development plan in a General Chemistry Laboratory course for Basic Sciences students in a Peruvian university. In planning the course, developed under the virtual modality, the Four-component instructional design system (4C / ID) model was taken as a reference. Critical thinking skills were monitored by applying Facione's Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric. The results were compared with those obtained by students from a previous cohort who had the same course under the standard modality. Chi square statistic was used, and it was verified that there were significant differences in the achievements obtained by both groups, being these favourable for the first group of students that followed the implemented model.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, science education, instructional design, assessment.