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The association between artificial intelligence and health specialty students’ critical thinking, clinical competency, and willingness to practice human interaction skills

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The use of AI in higher education is accelerating, inferring the need to investigate further the positive impact of AI on health specialty students’ academic performance in clinical care settings. The purpose of this study is to assess the relationship between artificial intelligence applications and health specialty students’ critical thinking, clinical competency, and perception of their willingness to practice human interaction skills with their patients. A number of 542 health specialty students from Jordanian universities participated in this cross-sectional correlational study. Four instruments were utilized for data collection: AI Attitude Scale (AIAS-4), the Critical Thinking Scale, the Clinical Competency Scale, and the Communication Assessment Tool (CAT). The instruments were translated to Arabic using the forward-backward procedure. Inferential and descriptive data were analyzed using SPSS version 28. Health specialty students mostly have positive attitudes toward using AI in clinical education (60.0%), have higher levels that AI assisted them in critical thinking, general skills, and clinical competency. Also, students had a moderate level that AI enabled to use effective therapeutic communications skills. AI use and utility has significance ( p < .05) and positive correlation with clinical competency, critical thinking and effective use of communication skills, with correlation magnitude ranging from ( r = .15) with effective use of communication skills to ( r = .42) with critical thinking-general skills. All standardized regression models of AI use on critical thinking, clinical competency and therapeutic use of effective communication skills models were significant ( p < .05); however, it is noted that R 2 for all variables was small in terms of magnitude, ranging from 0.024 (2.4%) for communication skills to 0.173 (17.3%) for critical thinking-general skills. Perception of AI use among health specialty students showed positive effect on critical thinking and perception of clinical competency urging the need to integrate AI application in health curricula and pedagogy.

Source: BMC Medical Education

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-025-08453-4