An Evaluative Review of Barriers to Critical Thinking in Educational and Real-World Settings

Mindware: Critical Thinking in Everyday Life

Humans make many decisions in everyday life, some of which require careful use of evidence. Because emotional and heuristic mental processes dominate human cognition, it is common to suggest that there is little hope that critical thinking tools will be widely used. However, the concept of "mindware" gives hope to the idea that critical thinking skills may be more widely deployed than they currently are. This article reflects on some impediments to critical thinking, assesses some future challenges to critical thinking being more widely used, and suggests that "mindware" modules can be used widely both in and out of educational settings to significantly enhance critical thinking in everyday life.

Impact of fatigue in surgeons on performance and patient outcome: systematic review

BACKGROUND

While fatigue is an inevitable aspect of performing surgical procedures, lack of consensus remains on its effect on surgical performance. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the effect of non-muscular fatigue on surgical outcome.

METHODS

MEDLINE and Embase were searched up to 17 January 2023. Studies on students, learning, duty-hour restrictions, muscle fatigue, non-surgical or subjective outcome, the weekend effect, or time of admission were excluded. Studies were categorized based on real-life or simulated surgery. The Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to assess RCTs and the Newcastle-Ottawa scale was used to assess cohort studies. Due to heterogeneity among studies, data pooling was not feasible and study findings were synthesized narratively.

RESULTS

From the 7251 studies identified, 134 studies (including 1 684 073 cases) were selected for analysis (110 real-life studies and 24 simulator studies). Of the simulator studies, 46% (11 studies) reported a deterioration in surgical outcome when fatigue was present, using direct measures of fatigue. In contrast, only 35.5% (39 studies) of real-life studies showed a deterioration, observed in only 12.5% of all outcome measures, specifically involving aggregated surgical outcomes.

CONCLUSION

Almost half of simulator studies, along with one-third of real-life studies, consistently report negative effects of fatigue, highlighting a significant concern. The discrepancy between simulator/real-life studies may be explained by heightened motivation and effort investment in real-life studies. Currently, published fatigue and outcome measures, especially in real-life studies, are insufficient to fully define the impact of fatigue on surgical outcomes due to the absence of direct fatigue measures and crude, post-hoc outcome measures.

Critical Thinking, Formation, and Change

In this paper, we propose an application of critical thinking (CT) to real-world problems, taking into account personal well-being (PB) and lifelong formation (FO). First, we raise a substantial problem with CT, which is that causal explanation is of little importance in solving everyday problems. If we care about everyday problems, we must treat the identification of causal relationships as a fundamental mechanism and action as a form of solution once the origin of the problem is unequivocally known. Decision-making and problem-solving skills should be the execution of the causal explanations reached. By acting this way, we change reality and achieve our goals, which are none other than those imposed by our PB. However, to achieve changes or results, we must have these fundamental competencies in CT, and these are not innate; we must acquire and develop them, that is, we must train ourselves to have CT competencies according to the demands of today's world. Finally, in this paper we propose a causal model that seeks to identify and test the causal relationships that exist between the different factors or variables that determine the CT-PB-FO relationship. We present some results on the relevance of causality and how to effectively form and address real-world problems from causality. However, there are still questions to be clarified that need to be investigated in future studies.

Critical Thinking, Intelligence, and Unsubstantiated Beliefs: An Integrative Review

A review of the research shows that critical thinking is a more inclusive construct than intelligence, going beyond what general cognitive ability can account for. For instance, critical thinking can more completely account for many everyday outcomes, such as how thinkers reject false conspiracy theories, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, psychological misconceptions, and other unsubstantiated claims. Deficiencies in the components of critical thinking (in specific reasoning skills, dispositions, and relevant knowledge) contribute to unsubstantiated belief endorsement in ways that go beyond what standardized intelligence tests test. Specifically, people who endorse unsubstantiated claims less tend to show better critical thinking skills, possess more relevant knowledge, and are more disposed to think critically. They tend to be more scientifically skeptical and possess a more rational-analytic cognitive style, while those who accept unsubstantiated claims more tend to be more cynical and adopt a more intuitive-experiential cognitive style. These findings suggest that for a fuller understanding of unsubstantiated beliefs, researchers and instructors should also assess specific reasoning skills, relevant knowledge, and dispositions which go beyond what intelligence tests test.