2. To behave as a competent and effective
clinician, we must think critically.
It is a central part of being a professional
who uses evidence-based practice.
4. Accept whatever you read or hear as fact.
Search for sources that will support your beliefs.
Look for the easy, quick answer.
Lack curiosity.
Fail to consider other reasons for why your
therapy works.
Gather information without analyzing the
information.
May ultimately end up hurting clients/patients, or
providing less helpful treatment.
5. Awareness of a set of interrelated critical
questions
Ability to ask and answer critical questions in
an appropriate manner
Desire to actively use the critical questions
A desire to improve what we think
Are curious, want to improve their skills, want
to challenge themselves, and take the time
necessary to ask the difficult/critical questions.
6. Advantages:
1. Gather a ton of information
2. A passive approach, takes less effort
3. Does not require asking important and critical
questions.
Disadvantage
There is not a method for deciding which
information or opinions to believe or reject.
7. Requires asking frequent questions and
reflecting on the answers.
Goes hand-in-hand with the sponge
approach.
Need to be an active reader, listener, and
evaluator.
8. Can there be a right answer based on the
types of problems our clients experience?
Obtaining a single “right answer” is
pretty much a myth.
How do we know what is the right
answer for our clients?
9. Use of critical thinking to defends one
own beliefs.
Using the questioning attitude to
support arguments that you already
believe or to support your own position.
Basically resist opinions and reasoning
different from yours.
10. Requires us to apply the critical
questions to all claims, including our
own.
Helps protect us from self-deception and
making mistakes.
Used as we continue to develop clinical
skills and help a variety of clients.
11. Does not cause us to abandon our beliefs.
May also allow us to solidify our beliefs and
further support them.
Allows us to be critical of what we do, and
continue to refine it.
Must have an open mind, be skeptical, and allow for
growth.
13. What are the issues and the conclusions?
What are the reasons?
Which words or phrases are ambiguous?
What are the value and descriptive assumptions?
Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?
How good is the evidence?
Are there rival causes?
Are the statistics deceptive?
What significant information is omitted?
What reasonable conclusions are possible?
Editor's Notes
Autonomy- Comfort with yourself to the point that you are comfortable hearing all points of view and making your own judgment. Curiosity-Be a good listener and reader. Drive to find the answers. Humility-Recognize that even you or the smartest person in the world can make a mistake in reasoning. Similarly, even the most compelling evidence has flaws. Respect for good reasoning wherever you find it.
There are a lot of downsides to being a non-critical thinker or non-critical clinician. Accept whatever you read or hear as fact. Search for sources that will support your beliefs. Think about FOX news or MSNBC. Look for the easy, quick answer. Lack curiosity. Fail to consider other reasons for why your therapy works. Gather information without analyzing the information. May ultimately end up hurting clients/patients, or providing less helpful treatment.
Requires asking frequent questions and reflecting on the answers. Goes hand-in-hand with the sponge approach. You continue to gather the information, you just actively interact with the information as it comes in, by asking questions about the information. Need to be an active reader, listener, and evaluator of the information as it is coming in.
Can there be a right answer based on the types of problems our clients experience? Obtaining a single “right answer” is pretty much a myth in our profession. Ask yourself: Is there one perfect approach to helping all clients with a certain disorder? Is there one perfect source for information? Is there one perfect approach to helping all clients with a certain disorder? Is there one perfect source for information? Should we even go looking for what is the right answer to a clinical problem? Intelligent guesses! There might be many correct answers, depending on the conditions in place. Or should we simply find the best supporting data for what we want to do with a client, and constantly question whether we are doing things that are benefiting the client?
Weak sense Use of critical thinking to defends one own beliefs. Using the questioning attitude to perhaps support arguments that you already believe or to support your own position. Political rhetoric is a perfect example of this type of critical thinking. Basically resist and annihilate opinions and reasoning different from yours.
Requires us to apply the critical questions to all claims, including our own. This also should be a part of therapy choices as well. Helps protect us from self-deception and making mistakes. Strong sense critical thinking is very important as continue to develop clinical skills and help a variety of clients. It allows us to maintain a healthy level of curiosity and skepticism about what we do as clinicians. Strong sense critical thinking is what will most likely help us to best serve our clients.
Here are some more benefits of strong sense critical thinking. First, it does not cause us to abandon our beliefs, though it may allow us to solidify our and support our beliefs in a rational way. There is a chance for continuous improvement when we employ strong sense critical thinking to our clinical and therapeutic behaviors.
Here we present some barriers to critical thinking for SLPs and other professionals. Wishful thinking is a major barrier to critical thinking for SLPs. For example, we may wish that a client would respond better to our treatments without taking critical steps to make this happen. Feeling and emotions can also get in the way of making evidence-based choices for our clients. And finally, arguing rarely gets us anywhere if it’s not done carefully. Some people can’t ask a question, or clarify a point, or ask for evidence without being argumentative. Think about how much more effective clinicians are if they can find common ground and values with their clients and co-workers.
When we ask questions, were need to think critically about the issue at hand. Here are some questions that get us thinking about the value and logic behind research in general. We need to be able to identify the issues, conclusions, and reasons presented to us in research or in clinical practice. We need to figure out if there are any ambiguous words or phrases, or if the person/entity presenting this information to us is biased in some way. We want to be able to evaluate the quality of the evidence, and how thorough the information is: is the argument a good one based on sound logic and facts? Has detail been omitted? Think about all of these questions as you begin to examine research studies and clinical practices more thoroughly. These questions will form the basis of your research project later on in the term, and will help you to be a better, more engaged clinician in your placements.
