Critical Thinking Disposition among Medical Students of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: Critical thinking as a process of purposeful self-regulatory judgment leads to problem solving and correct decision making in individuals. In the modern world, health care faces rapid change and burgeoning amount of knowledge. Possessing critical thinking is essential for individuals in health care centers, specially when they are forced to solve clinical problems. The aim of this study was to evaluate critical thinking disposition among medical students in various levels of education.

Methods: In this descriptive, cross-sectional study, we determined critical thinking disposition among 259 medical students of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. The students were studying at different levels of general physician education. In Iran general physician education divided into four levels; basic sciences, physiopathology courses, clerkship and internship. They were selected using stratified sampling. Data were collected using a questionnaire that consisted of two parts; demographic information of the participants and California Critical Thinking Disposition. To analysis the data, both descriptive and inferential statistics (One-way ANOVA) were employed using SPSS-16 software.

Results: Our findings indicated that 98.6% of the students lacked critical thinking disposition, 1.4% were ambivalent disposition and no one had positive disposition to critical thinking. The highest acquired score of critical thinking was for truth-seeking (20.4%) and the lowest score acquired for analyticity (4.8%). The results revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between mean score of participants with regards to their critical thinking disposition in various educational levels.

Conclusion: The findings of this study indicated that medical students lacked appropriate critical thinking disposition.