Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Pharmacy Students

Abstract

Objective. To review the importance of and barriers to critical thinking and provide evidence-based recommendations to encourage development of these skills in pharmacy students. Findings. Critical thinking (CT) is one of the most desired skills of a pharmacy graduate but there are many challenges to students thinking critically including their own perceptions, poor metacognitive skills, a fixed mindset, a non-automated skillset, heuristics, biases and the fact that thinking is effortful. Though difficult, developing CT skills is not impossible. Research and practice suggest several factors that can improve one's thinking ability: a thoughtful learning environment, seeing or hearing what is done to executive cognitive operations that students can emulate, and guidance and support of their efforts until they can perform on their own. Summary. Teaching CT requires coordination at the curricular level and further to the more discrete level of a lesson and a course. Instructor training is imperative to this process since this intervention has been found to be the most effective in developing CT skills.

Keywords: clinical decision making; course design; critical thinking; metacognition; problem solving.

Figure 1.

Schematic of Critical Thinking and its Relationship to Other Types of Thinking White boxes represent the thinking type while gray boxes provide descriptions of each type and show how the skills build upon each other