Encouraging Critical Clinical Thinking (CCT) Skills in First-Year Veterinary Students

Active learning for an evidence-based veterinary medicine course during COVID-19

Epidemiology is often a challenging course that is not well appreciated by many students learning veterinary medicine. The curriculum for this topic can sometimes be dry, difficult for students to contextualize, and heavy with statistics and mathematical concepts. We incorporated the concepts of epidemiology that are most important for practicing veterinarians and combined these with evidence-based veterinary medicine principles to create a practical course for second-year undergraduate veterinary students. We share the structure of our course and the different learning components, which also included incorporating graduate student mentors for journal clubs and an assignment that culminated in some students publishing their review findings. Anecdotal responses from students suggest they enjoyed the course and learned skills they felt would be useful in veterinary practice to help them make evidence-based clinical decisions.

Use of a Multimodal, Peer-to-Peer Learning Management System for Introduction of Critical Clinical Thinking to First-Year Veterinary Students

Veterinary medical students need multiple thinking strategies, particularly critical thinking. We used a multimedia, peer review learning management system (CGScholar) to introduce a series of complex, realistic, case-based e-learning modules to help introduce critical thinking to 422 first-year veterinary students through instructor-designed clinical cases. Students developed and published on the CGScholar platform an analysis of a case and conducted anonymous peer reviews of each other's drafts. Instructors selected desirable characteristics of a student's activity to track and provide automatic feedback to students via an analytics dashboard and aster plot that allowed visualization of progress. The dashboard also enabled instructors to view the entire class's performance, highlighting students whose performance was lagging. Online interactions were supplemented by case-specific face-to-face workshop sessions. Our goal was to address the following questions: Does the addition of multimedia to a work (one's own or others') enhance people's ability to understand and convey the material? Does peer review (of one's own and others' work) lead to improvements in the writer's own work? Does the peer review process enhance the writer's understanding of what constitutes high-quality literature evidence? An anonymous student survey showed that experience was significantly more positive in the second and third year of implementation after inclusion of explicit guidance on the use of the rubric for peer review. Overall, 67% of students thought inclusion of multimedia enhanced their ability to communicate and 52% agreed multimedia enhanced their ability to understand their peers' analyses, but students were split on benefits to their understanding of high-quality literature.

Creating the Next Generation of Evidence-Based Veterinary Practitioners and Researchers: What are the Options for Globally Diverse Veterinary Curricula?

Veterinary educators strive to prepare graduates for a variety of career options with the skills and knowledge to use and contribute to research as part of their lifelong practice of evidence-based veterinary medicine (EBVM). In the veterinary curriculum, students should receive a grounding in research and EBVM, as well as have the opportunity to consider research as a career. Seeing a lack of a cohesive body of information that identified the options and the challenges inherent to embedding such training in veterinary curricula, an international group was formed with the goal of synthesizing evidence to help curriculum designers, course leaders, and teachers implement educational approaches that will inspire future researchers and produce evidence-based practitioners. This article presents a literature review of the rationale, issues, and options for research and EBVM in veterinary curricula. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 key stakeholders across the eight Council for International Veterinary Medical Education (CIVME) regions. Emergent themes from the literature and interviews for including research and EBVM skills into the curriculum included societal need, career development, and skills important to clinical professional life. Approaches included compulsory as well as optional learning opportunities. Barriers to incorporating these skills into the curriculum were grouped into student and faculty-/staff-related issues, time constraints in the curriculum, and financial barriers. Having motivated faculty and contextualizing the teaching were considered important to engage students. The information has been summarized in an online "toolbox" that is freely available for educators to inform curriculum development.

Arizona Veterinarians' Perceptions and Consensus Regarding Skills, Knowledge, and Attributes of Day One Veterinary Graduates

The purpose of this study was to assess Arizona veterinarians' perceptions and consensus regarding the importance of items in the domains of clinical skills, knowledge, and attributes of Day One graduates of veterinary school and to determine demographic predictors for items on which consensus was low. In this survey-based prospective study, respondents were asked to rate the importance of 44 items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important). Responses were visualized as divergent stacked bar charts and evaluated via summary quantitative and qualitative analyses. Several items had a median score of 5. For clinical skills, items were the ability to formulate a preventive health care plan, the ability to interpret test results, and basic safe handling and restraint of animals; for knowledge, knowledge of pain management and anesthesia; and for attributes, teamwork, problem-solving skills, and client communication skills. The majority of items (80%) had a strong or very strong consensus measure, 18% had a moderate consensus measure, and 2% had a weak consensus measure. Six items (14%) varied by at least one demographic category. We found demographic differences between large and small animal practices in the clinical skill of ability to perform a necropsy, knowledge of large animal theriogenology, and knowledge of canine theriogenology. In conclusion, we found differences in the importance of items and agreement among practitioners, suggesting that critical evaluation of the mapped curriculum, particularly with regard to core curriculum compared with electives and clinical tracks, may benefit students and future employers.