A Survey about the Critical Thinking Skills of Faculty Members of Hamedan University of Medical Sciences

The current research has been conducted with the aim of surveying the critical thinking skills of faculty members of Hamedan university of medical sciences. Questionnaire being used in this research is California critical thinking skills test-form B (CCTST) which is printed and handed out to the official and full-time faculty members of Hamedan university of medical sciences and after a limited time of 45 minutes they were collected. Due to the specific type of the questionnaire in terms of type of the questions and method of answering the faculty members hardly accepted to cooperate: thus the convenience sampling was used and 152 correct and complete questionnaires were collected. Tests being used for analyzing the achieved data include: ANOVA test, Eta, Pearson correlation coefficient, independent t-test, and one sample t-test. Achieved results show that there was no significant difference and correlation between the components of critical thinking (analysis, deduction, evaluation, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning) and surveyed variables: age, gender, academic level, major, teaching experience, and No. of published articles and books. Also achieved statistics indicate a failure to achieve minimum scores in all the critical thinking skills (evaluation, analysis, deduction, inductive and deductive reasoning), in other words the level of critical thinking among the faculty members of the mentioned university is below average. Thus it could be said that this university needs necessary training in order to update its teaching methods.