Developing Critical Thinking in Higher Education: Is There a Reason to Change?

Abstract

Competency-based veterinary education has been proposed for long, but its implementation accelerated in recent years. It endorses the development of specific abilities, that are identified, and needed for a wide range of professional tasks. Nevertheless, the University's adaptation to the proposed competency-based framework is not always easy. It often depends on economic and administrative constraints and requests some time until the completion of the reforms. This time-lapse foster the skills mismatch existing between Academia and the labor market. Think4Jobs project organized focus groups interviews with Veterinarians with experience across many professional areas (e.g., clinical, food production and food safety, research), pre-graduate students and teachers, to identify core critical thinking-related competencies deemed crucial by the labor market. Triangulating the beliefs of Stakeholders and University detected some differences in the importance of competency domains, sustaining the need to change the pedagogical approach during learning and during the traineeships to enhance autonomy, self-regulation, and self-confidence in students’ clinical reasoning and decision-making skills. Based on the identified differences, the framework presented herein was proposed to strengthen the acquisition of those competencies across existing curricula.