| Multiple demands facing the veterinary medical profession including social, professional, technological, and informational changes have stimulated an educational reformation in the United States veterinary medical colleges. The profession is beginning to restructure its educational processes to focus on developing and strengthening the critical thinking skills of its students. However, little is known about how veterinary medical educators define critical thinking and what teaching strategies they use to promote critical thinking skills.;The purpose of this study was to determine how veterinary medical educators define critical thinking teaching strategies they use and to identify how they rate the effectiveness of these strategies in promoting critical thinking skills.;Using a revised version of Baker's (1992) Critical Thinking Teaching Strategies Survey, tenured and tenure track faculty members representing 11 veterinary medical colleges in the United States were surveyed. Results indicated that although veterinary medical educators had some understanding of the concept of critical thinking, it was not a comprehensive or unified understanding. The affective dimension of critical thinking, that is, the emotive behavior that allows the learner to view and understand situations from multiple perspectives, was deficient in the veterinary medical educators' definitions.;The most prevalent themes that emerged from the veterinary medical educators' definitions of critical thinking were problem solving and decision making, which were indicated by more than 51 percent of the respondents. However, the inconsistency of the emergent themes of the veterinary medical educators' definitions revealed that the faculty members fail to have a collective understanding of critical thinking. The critical thinking teaching strategies veterinary medical educators used and perceived effective were: (1) small group discussion, (2) case studies, (3) questioning, (4) group problem solving, and (5) clinical rounds. The veterinary medical educators rated lecture/discussion as an ineffective strategy in promoting critical thinking skills, yet it remained the teaching strategy most frequently used by educators surveyed in the 11 veterinary medical colleges.;The findings from this study suggest that veterinary medical educators do have some level of understanding of critical thinking and are implementing various critical thinking teaching strategies in the learning environment. However, the findings also suggest the need to further develop the educators' current knowledge of critical thinking and of the teaching strategies used to promote critical thinking skills. |
