We find CREATE Cornerstone students' outcomes on the CAT assessment encouraging in this regard.
Overall, the largest gains made by CREATE Cornerstone students were on CAT questions that tested "evaluating and interpreting information".
CREATE Cornerstone students made significant gains on the EDAT, which presents a scenario distinct from that of any of the Cornerstone readings.
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.
SAAB results show significant gains made by CREATE Cornerstone students in all six skills and attitudes categories and in the majority (four out of seven) of epistemological categories.
Students in both Fall and Spring CREATE Cornerstone classes completed a pre- and postcourse EDAT that was scored using a 10-point rubric (Sirum and Humburg, 2011).
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.
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".
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.
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.
