Assessment of the critical thinking skills of student radiographers

Purpose Enabling students to develop critical thinking skills is one of the key aims of higher education and in preparing student radiographers for the future, there are increasing demands on educators to teach critical thinking skills to facilitate reflective, evidence-based practice and inter-professional working. The aim of the paper is to attempt to compare students' self-perception of their critical thinking skills to their actual written assessment performance. Methods Students were asked to self-report how they thought the course had developed their critical thinking skills and the outcomes of this exercise were compared to the scores of previous assessments that required the demonstration of these skills. Results The results suggest that whilst students report having developed critical thinking skills during the course, the results of their written assessments requiring the demonstration of these skills all had a mean score of less than 60% which indicates (in terms of the university's grade criteria guidelines) "little attempt to use critical discussion in their work.'' Discussion Thirteen components of critical thinking are proposed, together with ways in which they could be incorporated into a radiographic curriculum. Conclusions It is suggested that educators may need to review the constructive alignment of their curricula and re-assess their teaching and assessment strategies in order to effectively develop students' critical thinking skills. (C) 2005 The College of Radiographers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.