Case Studies

Critical Thinking and Clinical Reasoning in the Health Sciences:
An International Multidisciplinary Teaching Anthology

Noreen C. Facione and Peter A. Facione (Eds.)

Published by The California Academic Press
www.insightassessment.com

ISBN (13 digit) 978-1891557-60-6
ISBN (10 digit) 1-891557-60-6

$49.95 - Paperbound

Thinking and Reasoning in Human Decision Making: The Method of Argument and Heuristic Analysis

Authors: Peter A. Facione and Noreen C. Facione

Published by The California Academic Press
www.insightassessment.com

ISBN (13 digit) 978-1891557-58-3
ISBN (10 digit) 1-891557-58-0

   $27.95 Paperbound

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 train clinical reasoning skills more effectively 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.

From theory to illustrative case studies, this groundbreaking volume describes a new methodology for explaining and predicting human decision making. The method of argument and heuristic analysis, based on the latest scientific findings from studies of human reasoning, combines both quantitative and qualitative research designs. Use of this method takes the study of human reasoning to a deep and authentic level. The decision mapping techniques presented in this volume enable one to display visually the flow of a reasoning process and to examine the influence of the reasons and heuristics which shape human decision-making.

This new volume emerges from decades of research into human decision making. It offers a scientifically grounded and very widely applicable methodology for explaining and predicting human decisions. The method accounts for the reasons actually used by decision makers to make naturalistic decisions. This approach provides objective methods for evaluating the logical strength and appropriate reliance on thinking heuristics. The focus is on high risk, time limited judgments made under conditions of uncertainty. Using this new approach one can explain unwarranted confidence in poor reasoning and persistence in defending poor judgments when there is ample evidence to the contrary.

Using this approach, professionals and scholars can map human decisions in leadership, business, military, health care, and human interpersonal situations. And they can craft ways of predicting and addressing errors through interventions designed to respect and build upon those elements in human thinking and reasoning which can become the basis for better judgments in all those contexts.