Creative and reasoning skills are low among health sciences students who rely mostly on memorized templates: an Australian case

Abstract

Creativity is an important skill that graduates of medical and health science courses require to address challenges of their professions. This study used a non-traditional special tool to test skills of creativity, learned prediction and reasoning of undergraduate students of health sciences in an Australian university. It was the questionnaire with one multiple choice type and two open-ended questions. Answers were scored independently by three experienced university educators. Correlations of scores the educators assigned indicated good reliability of the tool. Eighty-four undergraduate students attending medical and health sciences courses in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Adelaide, Australia were tested. Results indicate that less than half (48%) of students were acceptably creative while nearly 2/3 (64%) were adept at learned prediction. Less than 10% of students achieved high creativity scores. Only 1/3 of students achieved good scores for reasoning. It appears that undergraduate students are reasonably good at “learned prediction”, that is at repeating what they have learned earlier, while their reasoning and creative abilities are inadequate.