Preliminary development and validation of a diagnostic of critical thinking for introductory physics labs

Recent work has demonstrated the affordances of novel instructional design in physics labs to develop critical thinking skills. To guide broad institutional change, however, there is a need for efficient and validated assessment methods. In this paper, we present preliminary work on developing and validating a closed-response assessment of critical thinking skills, which focuses on how students reason with experimental data and test the validity of scientific models. The assessment asks students to reason about the methods, data, and analysis of two hypothetical case studies of students experimentally testing a model of Hooke's law. We describe the development and refinement of the cases and questions, and present preliminary results of validation studies.