At first blush, creativity in veterinary medicine, or any type of medicine, sounds like a scary proposition.  After all, none of us would like for a physician to be “winging it” when they deal with our personal medical problems. 

Learning how to think critically is like learning a new language...best done as young as possible.  The blog by MacKenzie Masten (link below) describes 5 strategies for encouraging critical thinking amongst K-12 students.

OK, for our non-U.S. members, the title of this Washington Post opinion piece by 6-time National Basketball League champion and social justice, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, sounds like a play on the U.S. President's campaign slogan.  But it really is more than that.

In veterinary medicine, we have long discussed “PBL” meaning “Problem-Based Learning,” but in his educational blog, A.J. Juliani discusses 10 educational truths supporting a related PBL, Project-Based Learning.  Cases or problems can motivate and incentivize students allowing them to express their interests and follow their curosity. Veterinary faculty in pre-clinical years should consider this more active learning approach.

"The profusion of facts obscured a deeper and more significant problem: the reconciliation between knowledge (certain, fixed, perfect, concrete) and clinical wisdom (uncertain, fluid, imperfect, abstract)."

Continuing in our analysis of the PISA 2012 problem-solving test results, the OECD chose to compare individual problem-solving tasks to the overall average. It should be noted that that average might not necessarily be the ideal balance of strengths of problem-solving skill subsets. Students from Europe and North America tended to perform less well than those from top-performing countries primarily in tasks associated with knowledge-acquisition.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests evaluate the academic skills of subset of 15 year old students to countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECP), consisting of 35 countries worldwide. This organization also tracks economic, educational and equity data and a full read of the results document will find correlations of PISA results with these parameters.

A recent study by Vinten et al. in the J. Vet. Med. Education documented the outcome of focus groups among faculty, staff, and recent graduates of the  University of Nottingham School of Veterinary Medicine and Science (SVMS) on the adequacy of current training on clinical reasoning skill.  One conclusion was that student development in this skill would be enhanced through increased responsibility for the outcome of clinical decisions within the training program.

In the Review of Educational Research, there is a meta-analysis study by Huber and Kuncel entitled “Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis." This and other related studies can be found at:   http://rer.aera.net