A Study of Critical Thinking Skills Among Medical Students of AbadanUniversity of Medical Sciences

Since medical care providers are faced with complex issues in their profession, one of the important skills in making correct clinical decisions is critical thinking. Therefore, one of the standards of medical education is to instill critical thinking in students.

The present study was a cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study. Data was collected using a demographic questionnaire and the standard California B questionnaire. Mann-Whitney test was used to make comparisons, and Spearman's correlation coefficient was used to check the correlation between the data.

The findings showed that the average critical thinking score of the participating medical students was 8.05 (± 2.6). Also, analysis and inference had the highest 2.5 (± 1.58) and lowest 2.51 (± 1.04) levels of obtainable score, respectively. Critical thinking had a significant positive correlation with all its components (P<0.001). The critical thinking of the participants was not significantly different in terms of gender or university entrance examination regions (P>0.05). The analysis showed that critical thinking has a significant positive correlation with age (r=0.159, P=0.018) but a significant negative correlation with years of education (r=-0.216, P=0.001) and grade point average in the last semester (r=-0.492, P=0.012).

The studied medical students did not have an optimal level of critical thinking, which is necessary for making appropriate and effective decisions, and this skill was found to have an inverse relationship with the grade point average and academic years. Therefore, it can be argued that the current educational system in the university has not been able to enhance this vital skill among medical students.