Stimulating students' critical thinking skills in pharmacology using case report generation

Abstract

It is not a debatable issue that the COVID‑19 pandemic created several challenges in the education sector, and institutions across the world had to employ various interventions to ensure continuation of teaching and learning. At the University of Pretoria, one of South Africa’s largest contact universities, exclusive online learning was implemented for the remainder of the first semester of 2020. Although this was helpful to facilitate learning during strict lockdown, it also came with its own problems. For third-year undergraduate students in the disciplines of nursing, dietetics, physiotherapy and medical sciences, pre-existing issues such as failure to apply critical thinking skills in pharmacology were inflated during this period. Critical thinking in education is defined as a learning process where students analyse, evaluate, interpret or synthesise information, and apply creative thought to solve a problem. However, for the majority of the abovementioned student cohort, which comprised 252 students, learning scarcely went beyond memorisation and recall of information and facts. A potential cause of this could have been diminished learning skills owing to pressure and anxiety associated with the pandemic as reported in the literature, or a lack of active interaction among the students, where prior to COVID‑19, problem-solving was often conducted as a team effort during contact sessions. A combination of these causes is also likely.