Centre for Health Education Scholarship, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Perspect Med Educ. 2018 Jun;7(3):156-165. doi: 10.1007/s40037-018-0415-z.
Calls for enabling 'critical thinking' are ubiquitous in health professional education. However, there is little agreement in the literature or in practice as to what this term means and efforts to generate a universal definition have found limited traction. Moreover, the variability observed might suggest that multiplicity has value that the quest for universal definitions has failed to capture. In this study, we sought to map the multiple conceptions of critical thinking in circulation in health professional education to understand the relationships and tensions between them.
We used an inductive, qualitative approach to explore conceptions of critical thinking with educators from four health professions: medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work. Four participants from each profession participated in two individual in-depth semi-structured interviews, the latter of which induced reflection on a visual depiction of results generated from the first set of interviews.
Three main conceptions of critical thinking were identified: biomedical, humanist, and social justice-oriented critical thinking. 'Biomedical critical thinking' was the dominant conception. While each conception had distinct features, the particular conceptions of critical thinking espoused by individual participants were not stable within or between interviews.
Multiple conceptions of critical thinking likely offer educators the ability to express diverse beliefs about what 'good thinking' means in variable contexts. The findings suggest that any single definition of critical thinking in the health professions will be inherently contentious and, we argue, should be. Such debates, when made visible to educators and trainees, can be highly productive.
在健康专业教育中，提倡“批判性思维”的呼声不绝于耳。然而，文献或实践中对于批判性思维的含义并没有达成共识，而且生成一个普遍定义的努力也收效甚微。此外，观察到的可变性可能表明，多样性具有普遍定义未能捕捉到的价值。在这项研究中，我们试图绘制健康专业教育中流通的批判性思维的多种概念，以了解它们之间的关系和紧张关系。
我们采用了一种归纳的、定性的方法，探索来自四个健康专业的教育者对批判性思维的看法：医学、护理、药学和社会工作。每个专业有 4 名参与者参加了两次单独的深入半结构化访谈，后者要求他们对从第一组访谈中生成的视觉描述进行反思。
确定了三种主要的批判性思维概念：生物医学、人文主义和社会正义导向的批判性思维。“生物医学批判性思维”是占主导地位的概念。虽然每个概念都有独特的特点，但个别参与者所拥护的批判性思维的具体概念在访谈内或访谈之间并不稳定。
批判性思维的多种概念可能使教育者能够在不同的背景下表达对“良好思维”的不同信念。研究结果表明，健康专业领域的任何单一批判性思维定义都将固有地存在争议，我们认为这是应该的。这些争论如果能让教育者和学员看到，就会极具成效。
