Developing students’ critical thinking has long been the pursuit of higher education, dating from John Dewey’s (1910) classic How We Think through the Educational Policies Commission’s whitepaper, The Central Purpose of American Education. In the current day, scholars and laypeople alike believe the need for higher education to improve students’ critical thinking is even more pressing. Unfortunately, few college courses have been empirically documented to succeed at this goal. In this presentation, I will describe my Psychology Research Methods course, which is based on the following pedagogical principles: distributed (rather than massed) practice; active (rather than passive) learning; collaborative (rather than competitive) peer-engagement; daily interaction between each student and the instructor or a TA; universal design (rather than by request) accessibility; and open-access (rather than proprietary) materials. I will also present data demonstrating that this course succeeded in improving students’ critical thinking.

Passion-Driven Statistics is a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that has been implemented as a statistics course, a research methods course, a data science course, a capstone experience, and a summer research boot camp with students from a wide variety of academic settings.  Funded by the National Science Foundation, the curriculum engages students in authentic projects with large, real-world data sets from the very first day! We focus on welcoming and empowering students to ask and answer questions they care about. As students engage in productive struggle in the context of their own original research, the instructor and peer mentors support each student individually through ample one-on-one mentoring. Together, we take students completely out of their comfort zone, and at the same time “love them through it” by creating an inviting classroom culture and an experience that gives them a safe and supportive space to “get it wrong before they get it right”, no matter their educational background or experience. https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/.