Abstract
Background: Due to the complexity of healthcare system and patients' multifaceted problems in today's healthcare environment, healthcare professionals' critical thinking and reasoning skills deem to be very important when addressing challenges encountered in daily practice. As such, educators in occupational therapy (OT), one of the healthcare professionals, strive to develop and facilitate OT students' critical thinking and reasoning skills in their curricula, such as via analyzing complex information with different ways of thinking and allowing for different solutions to problems. However, there is only a paucity of studies that have explored whether OT curricula can potentially and effectively impact students' critical thinking skills.|Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to explore whether the class 2014 of occupational therapy doctoral (OTD) students' critical thinking skills have changed after they completed the entry-level OTD curriculum at Creighton University.|Method: Fifty-three OTD students completed the Health Science Reasoning Test (HSRT) at the first semester and last semester respectively during their study of the OTD curriculum. The HSRT is an objective, norm-referenced measure designed to assess critical thinking skills applicable to health science education and professional workplace contexts. It includes five scale score (Analysis and Interpretation, Evaluation and Explanation, Inference, Deductive Reasoning, and Inductive Reasoning) as well as total critical thinking score. Paired-samples t-test was conducted to determine any significant change in these scores based on p < .008. |