Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate
physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do
with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors
through their written notebooks in an introductory physics laboratory course.
We compared student behaviors in the Structured Quantitative Inquiry Labs
(SQILabs) curriculum to a control group and evaluated the fragility of these
behaviors through procedural cueing. We found that the SQILabs were generally
effective at improving the quality of students' reasoning about data and making
decisions from data. These improvements in reasoning and sensemaking were
thwarted, however, by a procedural cue. We describe these changes in behavior
through the lens of epistemological frames and task orientation, invoked by the
instructional moves