University physics lab courses should aim to develop students’ experimental skills. These experimental skills have been—among others—conceptualized as critical thinking, i.e. as the ways in which one uses data and evidence to make decisions about what to trust and what to do in the lab. The Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking (PLIC) was developed to measure students’ critical thinking skills in the lab. PLIC measures three components: the ability to evaluate data, the ability to evaluate experimental methods and the ability to propose next steps for experimentation. However, little is known about the relationship between these components and how they develop. Thus, this study focuses on describing students’ critical thinking skill profiles amongst physics students based on these three components. We also look for connections between the profiles and students’ gender, self-efficacy, and view of experimental work. The data comes from a Finnish physics department, where students have answered to PLIC for 3 years in the beginning of a first-year lab course (N = 174). Latent profile analysis was used to classify the critical thinking profiles. Logistic regression was used to test to what extent students’ gender, self-efficacy, and attitude towards experimental work was related to profile membership. The results show three distinct critical thinking profiles named ‘average’ (n = 122), ‘method evaluators’ (n = 29) and ‘data evaluators’ (n = 22). Profile membership was independent of gender, self-efficacy, and view of experimental work. Future research should focus on replicating these profiles with data from different contexts and to longitudinally follow the development of critical thinking of students from different profiles.
Lehtinen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.