Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking and Clinical Reasoning Skills in Medical Education

Abstract

In recent years, there has been more emphasis on developing higher order thinking (e.g., critical thinking and clinical reasoning) processes to tackle the recent trends and challenges in medical education. Critical thinking and clinical reasoning are considered to be the cornerstones for teaching and training tomorrow's doctors. Lack of training of critical thinking and clinical reasoning in medical curricula causes medical students and physicians to use cognitive biases in problem solving which ultimately leads to diagnostic errors later in their professional practice. Moreover, there is no consensus on the most effective teaching model to teach the critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills and even the skill is not effectively tested in medical schools. This chapter will focus on concepts, contemporary theories, implications, issues and challenges, characteristics, various steps, teaching models and strategies, measuring and intervention tools, and assessment modalities of critical thinking and clinical reasoning in medical education settings.