SCIENTIFIC REASONING ABILITIES OF UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS AT KFU

摘要

Science is a discipline that manifests experimentation and thinking to study various aspects of nature. A major prerequisite in grooming youngsters to be our future scientists starts from provoking their scientific reasoning abilities. According to Joyce and Weil [1] inquiry training promotes students' intellectual ability, and subsequently enhances their reasoning and answering skills stemming from the curiosity. Congruently, scientific reasoning is a necessity for engineers to form creative solutions and applications. A major goal of the college of engineering at King Faisal University (KFU) maintains that students should have the confidence and competence to use the questioning and analytic approach basically termed as "Scientific Reasoning". This study was conducted at KFU to assess scientific reasoning abilities amongst first-year engineering and science undergraduate students. A Scientific Reasoning Test was administered and then categorized into three levels of scientific reasoning known as: the Empirical Inductive (low), transitional (average) and Hypothetical Deductive (high). Insight into how the students answered the test was thoroughly discussed.