Critical Thinking to Face Uncertain and Complex Health Issues: COVID-19 Vaccination

This chapter presents a study on critical thinking aimed at identifying the types of knowledge, skills, and attitudes involved in the practice of critical thinking during decision-making on health-related socio-scientific issues. The research was conducted in a context of great uncertainty, characterized by the pace of COVID-19 vaccination and the first cases of immunization in Spain. The purpose is to explore how these dimensions of critical thinking were articulated by a group of preservice preschool teachers (N = 81) and to analyze how they manage uncertainty. The examination of individual written responses allows to identify that participants were able to mobilize diverse types of knowledge and CT skills, being uncertainty, the only feature of epistemic knowledge acknowledged by them. Concerning CT attitudes, what is notable is that despite the uncertain situation, participants showed self-confidence in their responses and position of receiving the vaccine. Implications for further investigation on CT as various forms of meta-level thinking arise.