Developing quantitative critical thinking in the introductory physics lab

While the goals for instructional labs have been highly debated, there is consensus that labs have unique potential to develop students' scientific and experimentation abilities. I present a simple scaffold for introductory labs that uses iterative cycles of comparisons (either between data sets or between data and models) to develop students' epistemologies, experimentation behaviors, and critical thinking abilities. By focusing the iterations on improving measurements, students explore the limits of physical models in the real world and engage in the evaluation and refinement of these models. In a controlled research study, students adopted these behaviors and continued to use them even after instruction to do so had been removed.