Never let a crisis go to waste: Repurposing independent research projects to enhance students' critical thinking skills.

The recent lockdown of laboratories in the COVID-19 era has negatively impacted many lab-based courses for undergraduate students; however, research project classes have been hardest hit. Unlike the lab-based lecture courses, where many of the lab instructors have resorted to virtual experiments and videos to substitute for actual lab experiments, senior year independent research courses, which are supposed to involve real lab-based research, are struggling to find an appropriate solution. A possible solution to cases where the coronavirus pandemic lockdown has led to no or little student-generated lab data are to shift the focus of these research project courses such that they are taught as mentor-guided critical thinking exercises, using the primary literature. As an example, the lack of complete understanding for the molecular basis of protein thermostability can be used to promote such higher-level thinking skills.