On Monday, October 23, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. c.t., the next meeting of our Physics Colloquium will take place.
Speaker is Prof. Dr. Mieke de Cock (KU Leuven) on the topic "Supporting students to think critically in Physics"..
Devoloping students' critical thinking (CT) skills is one of the major goals of (science) education and so the need to embed critical thinking instruction in the teaching of academic disciplines in higher education has become an important focus of researchers and teachers. While for some time it was advocated to teach critical thinking separately from subject matter, this point of view became less dominant recently. Embedding CT within a subject matter domain is expected to result in initial learning of domain-specific CT skills and transfer of those learned CT skills to other domains. Domain-specific CT refers to the ability to think critically in a domain that requires subject matter expertise, whereas domaingeneral CT refers to the ability to think critically in a domain that requires knowledge of everyday life. An immediate question asks under what instructional conditions such initial learning and transfer of CT skills could happen? In this colloquium, we start from different "definitions" of Critical Thinking in the literature and the implications for the teaching of CT skills. We then discuss some ideas on the teaching of CT in the domain of physics and a recent project on CT on the physics of climate change.
Abstract of the lecture by Prof. de Cock
The introduction will be made by Dr. Rainer Wackermann.
The faculty cordially invites all interested parties. The event will take place in the lecture hall HZO 20. Before the colloquium we offer coffee and cookies.
All dates of the Physics Colloquium can be found here.