Co-design creation of Critical Thinking embedded activities in clinical courses

Abstract

The existence of a skills’ gap in graduates at day 1 compared to the needs of the labour market is often mentioned. Typically, those gaps revolve around communication, collaboration and teamwork, problem-solving, and critical thinking (CrT) (Vista 2020; Thornhill-Miller et al. 2023). In the workplace context, CrT is essential for problem-solving, decision-making, and innovation. In the field of health sciences, CrT is interconnected with clinical reasoning (CR) (Payan-Carreira et al. 2019). Previous focus groups held with educators, students and labor representatives in Veterinary Medicine revealed conceptual differences among labor market stakeholders (Dumitru et al, 2023), sustaining that most valued and perceived CrT-related skills and dispositions as lacking in newly-graduates. The Think4Jobs ERASMUS+ project proposed to strengthen the cooperation between Universities and the Labour Market (LM) by designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating CrT blended curricula. The project linked/associated LM representatives and Universities to produce tailored learning activities with the intention to minimize the identified mismatches in CrT skills and dispositions (Rebelo et al. 2023). To secure attractive and effective learning interventions, the participatory co-design approach was selected to leverage CrT and CR in Veterinary Medicine students. The participatory co-design contributed with opportunities to translate scientific knowledge into work-based situations. The participatory co-design implied engaging the stakeholders of the product (in this case, day-1 veterinary graduates) in the formative process, adding to the exchange of perspectives between the Academia and LM representatives. Moreover, by bringing the profession-learning into the class, it was expected to also foster students’ engagement with more active learning styles. In this presentation we describe the methodology used to create real-case problems to be developed in the blended veterinary curricula using a participatory co-design approach. The goals were to enhance the students’ CrT (skills and dispositions) acquisition and ultimately to trigger them to decide on the solutions to specific, real-life problems. Of Scandinavian origin, the term participatory design refers to a user-centred design model involving users and designers in the process of technological development (Asaro, 2000). Co-design hints at the participation of designers (herein, the educators) and other stakeholders in the development process, assuming that everyone may contribute with their experiential and conceptual knowledge (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Herein, we detail the construction of student-centred CrT-blended activities to be implemented in courses with a clinical dimension, specifically, in the Veterinary Medicine Integrated Master offered at University of Évora.