Abstract:

The tremendous growth of technology innovations we witness every day has impacted every aspect in our life, and education is no exception. Among the notable changes that technology has brought to education is the ability to facilitate critical thinking skills in the classrooms in a much easier way than it was before. While there have been considerable advances in education technologies to support critical thinking skills, these advances are still limited in science disciplines in general, and in particular, learning for science-based professions such as medicine. To fill in this research gap, we have conducted two case studies using the Common Ground Scholar online platform to demonstrate how effective integration of e-Learning tools in medical education can promote higher-order thinking, and in particular, critical clinical thinking. The study took place in two medical courses at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with first year medical students. A total of 130 students participated in the study taking the immunization and vaccination course in the Fall 2016 Semester and then the autoimmunity course in the Spring 2017 Semester with the same instructor. Drawing on our experience in this study and bringing evidence from students’ clinical cases as well as the post course survey, we found that the platform’s pedagogical design supports medical students to become critical thinkers by assisting them to generate and evaluate new knowledge, clarify concepts and ideas, seek diverse perspectives, and consider alternative approaches to solving problems as they work on their clinical cases.

Keywords:

e-learning, Critical thinking, medical education.