Our findings in the pilot CREATE Cornerstone course suggest that these viewpoints can be changed over a single semester through intensive analysis of scientific literature.
We felt that a CREATE Cornerstone course focused on scientific thinking could support and build students' science interest at an early phase of their academic careers.
A related motivation for developing the CREATE Cornerstone course was that the biology department at CCNY, like its counterparts elsewhere, loses many would-be majors during the early years of the biology curriculum.
Students in the Fall CREATE Cornerstone course took the CAT (Table 1; Stein et al., 2012), and tests were scored by a trained team at Tennessee Tech University, where this test was created.
While these findings must be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size, they suggest that students in the pilot CREATE Cornerstone course made substantial gains in their ability to read, understand, and critically analyze information, and that such gains are transferable to the content domain addressed by the CAT test, which was not related to the material covered in the course.
After one semester, the freshmen in the CREATE Cornerstone course reported significant increases in four of the seven epistemological categories we surveyed: the uncertain nature of scientific knowledge; the question of whether one needs to have a special innate ability to do science; whether science is creative; and their sense of scientists as "real people".
Introduction to Scientific Thinking, the CREATE Cornerstone course, improved critical-thinking and experimental design skills of freshmen at the same time that it positively shifted their attitudes about their reading/analytical abilities, their understanding of scientists as people, and multiple aspects of their epistemological beliefs.
Taken together, our findings support the hypothesis that a CREATE Cornerstone course designed for first-year students can bring about gains in multiple areas, including critical-thinking and experimental design ability, self-rated attitudes, abilities and epistemological beliefs, and understanding of scientists as people.
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