The PLIC: Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking

The Physics Lab Inventory for Critical thinking (PLIC) is a new assessment under development and validation for physics lab courses. A great deal of time and money is spent on science lab courses, but there is little evidence evaluating whether they are providing good educational value. Labs also suffer from a lack of consensus on goals and on accepted assessment instruments. The PLIC aims to fill gap by assessing students' proficiency with critical thinking as related to making sense of data, variability, and models. Here we present the development and validation efforts thus far, and early data and findings.