Misinformation is a critical global challenge with significant societal implications, including compromised decisionmaking and democratic processes. Higher education plays a vital role in equipping students with critical thinking skills to navigate misinformation effectively. This study investigates the application of inoculation theory—a psychological framework that builds resistance to persuasion through exposure to weakened doses of misinformation and its manipulative techniques—in a higher education context. A one-week intervention was integrated into a competency-based general education course, involving 135 second-year college students from diverse disciplines. A multitechnique approach combining passive and active strategies was employed, including lectures, case studies, video presentations, interactive games, and expert-led discussions. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured the students' ability to identify misinformation, gauge confidence levels, and evaluate their willingness to share misleading content. Using confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance frameworks, we validated the construct of misinformation identification as a latent trait. The results revealed a statistically significant improvement in students' ability to discern manipulative content, confirming the effectiveness of the inoculation-based intervention. The findings underscore the potential of multifaceted inoculation strategies to enhance critical thinking and misinformation resilience, providing a model for broader applications in educational settings. This work advances both the theoretical understanding of inoculation theory and its practical implementation in fostering informed decision-making and resilience against misinformation in a digitally complex era.

Critical thinking is an important skill that professionals of all disciplines must possess. In this work, a case study where a group of students undertook a sciences and technology course with the goal of developing critical thinking is presented. Particularly, whether the students developed skills after the course was assessed by using the standardized “Watson-Glaser” critical thinking test. When comparing the performances, it was found that the mean score increased by around 4 in a scale from 0 to 100. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was conducted to assess normality, followed by a Wilcoxon and a Multi-factor Analysis of Variance, to determine statistical significance. It was found that the scores did not follow a normal-behavior, and that results are statistically significant, based on critical p and F values. Therefore, it was concluded that the sciences and technology course helped students develop critical thinking skills.

Gamification is a process of adding game elements to change the learning method and improve the results. This educational innovation activity has the main objective of impacting Biotechnology and Chemical Engineering students' comprehension about biomolecules for the Fundamentals of structure and properties of biomolecules subject in the third semester of their careers by immerse them in a gamification-type activity where they carried out different biomolecule identification activities through 3D printed structures that they previously reviewed theoretically in class. This activity was conducted in the winter semester of 2021 and 2022, where 139 students were divided into the experimental and the control groups. The rally development consisted in four stages as it follows: the challenges design for each rally station where the selected ones were to put together the atoms sequence to form an amino acid, to identify the components of a cell membrane, to represent the movement of the ions in the sodium potassium pump, and to find a biomolecule in the campus with provided clues. Once the challenges were chosen, the material was made by 3D printing and then the competition rally took place and the winning team with the shortest finishing time was named in a ceremony. To evaluate the students' knowledge retention, an argumentative exam was applied and the participants' perception was estimated by a Google form. The learning activity had a significant impact on the performance of the course with a p-value of <0.01, and according to the evaluation, the students consider that this type of activity helps them to retain concepts and information.

The teaching-learning process in an Engineering thermodynamics course benefits from laboratory components as experiential learning activities. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic brought difficulties for the use of experiential learning in lab-based topics. This work describes the results from implementing an at-home non-traditional laboratory, where the students had to design and build a prototype to conduct experiments and analyse results. Results indicate positive learning outcomes and both acceptance and satisfaction from the students; the students had a mean mark of 89.22; comparatively, the previous year in-person overall mean mark was 87.98. Moreover, from a conducted student experience survey, in terms of overall satisfaction, the obtained score was 9 out of 10, while when the module was taught in-person the average score was 9.1.