THINKING ISSUESComputer science education---

Computational Thinking in Life Science Education

We join the increasing call to take computational education of life science students a step further, beyond teaching mere programming and employing existing software tools. We describe a new course, focusing on enriching the curriculum of life science students with abstract, algorithmic, and logical thinking, and exposing them to the computational "culture." The design, structure, and content o...

Critical Thinking Environments for Science Education

We have developed a range of critical thinking environments for science education that span several academic content areas, including human biology, geology and forestry. All environments share a methodology, infrastructure and sets of assumptions and tools, which allows them to leverage from the accomplishments and intuitions of the others. These tutors support a student on the Web to be activ...

Spatial Thinking in Undergraduate Science Education

Spatial ability has been dubbed the "Sleeping Giant" in education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) (Lubinsky, 2010). We know, from research done over the past several decades, that visuospatial thinking is central to the learning and doing of science (see Ramadas, 2009 for a review), and leads to success in many professions related to science and mathematics (Hegarty, ...

Redesigning a General Education Science Course to Promote Critical Thinking

Recent studies question the effectiveness of a traditional university curriculum in helping students improve their critical thinking and scientific literacy. We developed an introductory, general education (gen ed) science course to overcome both deficiencies. The course, titled Foundations of Science, differs from most gen ed science offerings in that it is interdisciplinary; emphasizes the na...

The Role of Spatial Thinking in Undergraduate Science Education