Abstract
Health science educators share successful teaching strategies for training critical thinking and clinical reasoning in the classroom and in the clinic. All the authors are published researchers who have achieved teaching excellence in the area of clinical reasoning. They represent all professional levels and academic ranks, and work in pre-service and in-service clinical and academic settings on four continents. Whether their teaching is on-line or face-to-face, they demonstrate the effectiveness of their approaches for building critical thinking skills and habits of mind in the context of authentic clinical problems. This teaching anthology offers thoughtful examples that will guide even the experienced educator to more effectively train clinical reasoning skills using problem-based learning, clinical cases, think-aloud, reflective role-play, team problem-solving, reflective journaling and many other approaches to engage students in the critical thinking skills of interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition. These active learning pedagogies foster and sustain positive critical thinking habits of mind such as truth-seeking, inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, systematicity, maturity of judgment, and confidence in reasoning. The positive effects of these approaches register both as observable cognitive behaviors in the course of clinical decision making and as significant improvements in students' reasoning test scores.[Book Synopsis]