Critical Thinking in Dental Students and Experienced Practitioners Assessed by the Health Sciences Reasoning Test

Abstract

To date, there has been a lack of published studies examining the validity of the Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT) to assess critical thinking among dental students. The aim of this study was to examine the construct validity of the HSRT using a novice-expert model consisting of first-year dental students as novices and experienced general dentists as experts. Novice cohort subjects were recruited from all 105 students in the first-year dental school class at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio during a regularly scheduled course in August 2015. A total of 83 students participated, for a 79% response rate. Thirty individuals personally recruited from the same school's faculty and from private practitioners made up the expert cohort. The results showed that the adjusted mean overall score for the expert cohort (25.31) was significantly higher than that of the novice cohort (22.64) (p=0.04). The expert cohort achieved higher adjusted mean scores in all scales (Induction, Deduction, Analysis, Inference, and Evaluation), with the difference in the Analysis scale being significant (p=0.02). In this study, experienced general dentists achieved significantly better overall scores on the HSRT as compared to first-year dental students, suggesting the instrument was able to measure differences between novice and expert. Further efforts to validate the instrument in a dental education setting and to understand its correlation with strategies and practices aimed at developing critical thinking in dental students are warranted.

Critical Thinking in Health Sciences and How It Pertains to Sonography Education: A Review of the Literature

“…All these studies 4,5,10,11,18 supported the value of the HSRT to measure changes in critical thinking skills. The methodologies in these studies are similar, but the noviceexpert method used by Hanlon et al 10 and Huhn et al 11 identified differences in critical thinking skills of novice students compared to an expert cohort. Huhn et al 11 described how novices in a health science field critically think of situations differently from experts.…”

“…They used HSRT scores to identify differences in critical thinking skills between groups and evaluated construct validity of the HSRT. In a similar study, Hanlon et al 10 used the HSRT to measure differences in critical thinking of first-year dental students compared to general dentists. They also aimed to establish construct validity of the HSRT to determine differences in critical thinking between novice and expert groups.…”

“…Quasi-experimental designs have many qualities of experimental designs but lack randomization of study participants, similar groups, or both, but these types of designs are effective alternatives when a randomized control trial is not possible. 19 Previous studies 10,11,20 used quasi-experimental designs to assess the construct validity of the HSRT to measure cognitive changes between various educational levels of clinicians. Each of the studies listed measured changes of physical therapy students, nursing students, and dental students, but no research was discovered to assess novice and expert sonographers' critical thinking skills.…”

“…There are significant publications describing tools that programs use to evaluate students' critical thinking skills during didactic courses or as admission criteria for selecting desirable students. 5,10,11 Currently, there is limited research regarding critical thinking of sonography students. Critical thinking in sonography requires students to constantly search for answers, provide rational explanations, and evaluate their own studies to correctly produce images that aid in diagnosing disease processes.…”

Reading “Reasoning Minds”

“…Dental educators are paying a lot of attention to how to incorporate and assess students’ critical thinking skills, accelerated by implementation of an accreditation standard on critical thinking and problem‐solving in 2013 1 – 3 . The difficulty we face is that both the teaching and assessment of these skills are challenging given their very nature.…”