The assessment of critical thinking skills in anatomy and physiology students who practice writing higher order multiple choice questions

Critical thinking is a complex abstraction that defies homogeneous interpretation. This means that no operational definition is universal and no critical thinking measurement tool is all encompassing. Instructors will likely find evidence based strategies to facilitate thinking skills only as numerous research efforts from multiple disciplines accumulate.;This study focuses on a question writing exercise designed to help anatomy and physiology students. Students were asked to design multiple choice questions that combined course concepts in new and novel ways. Instructions and examples were provided on how to construct these questions and student attempts were sorted into levels one through three of Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956). Students submitted their question designs weekly and received individual feedback as to how they might improve. Eight course examinations were created to contain questions that modeled the Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy levels that students were attempting. Students were assessed on their course examination performance as well as performance on a discipline independent critical thinking test called the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST). The performance of students in this study was compared to students from two previous years that took the same course but did not have the question writing activity. Results suggest that students do not improve their ability to answer critical thinking multiple choices questions when they practice the task of creating such problems. The effect of class level on critical thinking is examined and it appears that the longer a student has attended college the better the performance on both discipline specific and discipline independent critical thinking questions. The data were also used to analyze students who improved their course examination grades in the second semester of this course. There is a pattern to suggest that students who improve their performance on course examinations did so largely in non-critical thinking problems. Although, when this subset of students is analyzed by class level it appears that sophomores reverse the pattern and improve much more in critical thinking type questions than their upper classmen. The implications of this are discussed.